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Managing the flow of calls and agent availability in the contact center is nothing short of challenging. If agents forget to set their status to busy when an outbound call is made, the inbound call routed to that agent could result in a frustrated customer who wasn’t planning to wait several minutes in a hold queue.

Agents have enough to juggle when trying to serve the client base; requiring that they also remember to change their status may be crossing the line. Fortunately, there is call center software technology available to automate this process. Hosted contact center provider 8x8 (News - Alert) highlighted in one of its latest blogs how to automatically set an agent’s status as busy to ensure calls get routed to the right individual.

According to 8x8, the contact center needs to configure the agent’s status to automatically change to busy when a call is routed through an outbound phone queue. This routing is configured by creating outbound phone queues and assigning agents to those queues; the outbound phone codes are then defined and each code is associated with an outbound queue; agents are then assigned codes used when making a call.

In following this method, the agent making an outbound call will be presented with a selection of codes before the call is executed. The agent selects the proper code and the call is then routed through to the specified queue, instantly changing the agent’s status to busy. As a result, an incoming call is routed to an agent that can not only handle the call, but is also available.

8x8’s Outbound Phone (News - Alert) Codes can be used for a variety of purposes, including setting up caller ID options, determining the purpose of a call, managing agent status during outbound calls and more. It fits a need within the blended call center so that agents that tend to serve inbound calls most of the day can easily jump onto outbound calls when the campaign needs exceed capacity.

The customers’ experience when interacting with the contact center plays an important part in their overall perception of the brand. If that perception is formed through unnecessary wait times, it could mean that customer will look to the competition instead of wait for an available agent. Likewise, the agent struggling to manage too many activities when conducting a day’s work can streamline processes to ensure they stay on task with each call.

At the end of the day, both the customer and the agent experience a higher level of satisfaction.