Universal Queuing to Level the Playing Field and Cut Costs
Konstantin Kishinsky, CEO, BrightPattern
+1 650-529-4099
Konstantin.Kishinksy@brightpattern.com
Last month, we hosted a webinar with David “DJ” Jones, Director of Client Services at National Marketing Resources.
DJ explained how universal queuing – having agents handle inbound customer contacts across multiple channels – can be an equalizer for smaller contact centers, enabling them to compete with larger players, and cut costs by reducing associate attrition.
We provide an excerpt here, and the full webinar is available on our website.
DJ: Welcome! When I think about Universal Queuing and its implication to call center operations, to me it’s really tied to utilization, hence the contact center’s ability to utilize agents fully.
So the first thing I would like to talk about is per minute billing. Per minute billing is a model that will be very familiar to anybody that operates in a business process outsourcing space because it’s probably the way that you are billing your clients.
For those of us who manage in-house customer service contact centers, understanding your permanent operating cost is also useful as a way of determining if the call center is performing efficiently. So I think that if you look at it in terms of operating cost per minute, it’s a metric that everybody can relate to.
So let me set some expectations. Contact centers exist to serve clients, and in order to service those clients they have to create staffing models that allow them to achieve with all these services that is typically expressed to the service-level goal and a quality assurance requirement satisfaction goal. Client satisfactions beyond the scope of our discussion today, what I want to focus on is staffing, utilization and the opportunities for increased efficiency that we can realize by using a holistic approach to work flow management for Universal Queuing.
Let's talk a little bit about utilization. It's the percentage of time an agent will actually be occupied on a call versus available but waiting for a call. One of the cool things about Universal Queuing is it lets you fill that downtime with other production activities and it lets you do it very efficiently, because the same ACD that is routing calls to those agents is also going to be the ACD that routes them email, that routes them check interactions, that routes them social media’s interactions. It's often filled by the same ACD. That ACD is plugged into your workforce management software.
So, not only can the ACD make decisions based on what's going on right now but the ACD has your call arrival data. So, it can look at the day, determine am I above forecast or below forecast and adjust the workload appropriately, and it can do it very fast and it can do it very accurately. And that is where a lot of the power in the Universal Queuing Model comes from. It may take somebody in your workforce management department that is actively watching queuing, and actively moving agents from one skill to another 20 to 40 minutes to look at the day’s data, determine I am above or below forecast and I need to reallocate resources in a certain way to accommodate that.
An ACD with Universal Queuing functionality that's tied into your workforce management solution, has all that data available, and it can make that determination much faster than a human being, and it can also react more dynamically, maybe on below forecast before noon and the trend reverses afternoon, and I start coming an above forecast. The ACD can adjust to that a lot faster than a human can because it's not having to observe, orient, decide, and act the way a human does. It's just performing calculations and allocating resources.
What drives your associates away is when they are just back to back to back inbound client contacts, inbound calls. If I am on a call and then I answer an email and then I do a chat session or I do multiple chat sessions and then I take another call, the agent is more fully utilized, but from the agent’s perspective, the chance to respond to that email, as a chance to respond to that chat is actually a break. So the agent is more fully utilized, but they are not as incentivized to leave because they feel overwork.
Emails, voicemail call backs and outbound activity, all becomes measurable through one integrated ACD which is huge. I don’t know how many of you out there are in the position that we are in, but it's extremely frustrating when you’ve got four different platforms and you are trying to pull data from four different platforms that combine that data to create a picture of what your agent did in the last 24 hours or the last week or the last month. It's wonderful to be able to go to one place and have all that data available.
My professional opinion is that in 10 years every commercial call center will be using this technology, because we are going to have to. If they don’t migrate to this technology, they are not going to be able to remain competitive in terms of their utilization and their operating costs and they are going to find themselves consistently under-bid by centers that have embraced this approach.
Bright Pattern provides next-generation cloud contact center software, ServicePattern™, which includes native multichannel support to improve customer experience, and scales like no other offering on the market, to 5,000 agents and above.
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Konstantin Kishinsky, CEO, BrightPattern
+1 650-529-4099
Konstantin.Kishinksy@brightpattern.com
Konstantin has a strong background leading engineering and advanced application development teams. Konstantin has served in key management roles including Director of Engineering at Genesys Telecommunication Laboratories, Inc. (Alcatel since 2000), VP of Product Development at FrontRange, and Founder and CEO of Cayo Communications, Inc. Konstantin attended the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, earning a Master’s in Engineering Physics. He holds six patents and has published seven scientific articles.