Workforce Management Featured Article
Two Approaches to Multichannel Agent Skilling in Today's Contact Center
In today’s contact center, customers continue to prefer the telephone over all other possible communications media: about 75 percent of the time, when a customer has an issue, he or she picks up the telephone. However, this doesn’t mean that contact centers can ignore other media channels, since the other 25 percent of the time, customers are turning to alternatives such as e-mail, mobile apps, social media, self-service and Web-based contact channels.
Since customers today expect companies to meet their needs regardless of what channel they choose, it’s extra important to include these multimedia channels in your contact center’s scheduling. Essentially, this means ensuring you have achieved true multichannel skill scheduling.
While many of today’s multichannel workforce optimization solutions can help, achieving true multimedia skilling takes a certain flair and skill to accomplish, according to workforce optimization provider Monet Software in a recent blog. The company’s CEO, Chuck Ciarlo, blogs that multichannel scheduling begins with a specification of service goals based on the types of channels the call center must handle, followed by agent skill assessment within each of these channels.
“Once these standards are set, scheduling will require accurate calculation of the average handle time (AHT) for each contact channel,” writes Ciarlo. “This is easier to do with calls than with emails or chats where agent can handle multiple chats at the same time for example. A workforce management system takes these differences into consideration.””
Once these calculations are made, there are two different approaches the multiskill call center can take, depending on its needs, according to Monet.
Dedicated agent pools. Once skill sets are sorted out, agents can then be assigned to a dedicated group that focuses solely or primarily on the media channel in which their skills are sharpest: for example, chat or making outbound calls.
The universal queue. The dedicated agent pool model may not work for all contact centers, and instead, the business may prefer to route all contacts from the same queue to agents simply based on order and availability. This method doesn’t allow for quite as much customization and specialization, but it means agents will gain skills in all media rather than focus on one or two.
Which method you choose is going to depend a lot on your business, your agents and their skills, your customers and their needs, your contact center solutions and your goals for the business.
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli