Fine Tuning Tips
Many of you using this product will have inbound operations as well, and will have devoted much time to the task of matching agents, in both qualities and quantities, to handle expected fluctuations in inbound call volume, at the same time meeting service and abandoned call objectives.
You don't often hear outbound calling being analyzed in these terms. Sometimes it's just an adjunct to inbound, and the system will switch agents to outbound, only as the inbound calls fall off.
In practice there is considerable scope for applying scheduling techniques to outbound campaigns to take account of issues such as
- differences in agent skill levels
- shifts in the distribution of call outcomes over the day
- differences in talk times and result rates over the day.
Where these matters are important to you, you may find that you will want to run several campaigns across the day, to bring out the differences in performance you will get.
Here are some useful tips to consider in conjunction with your use of the Work Scheduler
1) Matching agents to particular calls
You can do this in two ways in Oceanic®
- If a particular agent needs to be available to take particular calls, then the calls need to be taken in either open or closed preview characteristics. Open preview agents can be mixed in with predictive and power dialing in any combination you want on the same campaign.
- But if you plan to allocate the work schedules separately, on the basis of significant differences in results, when particular groups of calls are assigned to particular agent types, you may find it best to treat each combination as a separate campaign, particularly if your dialing method uses an overdial. But there are no golden rules on this. In some cases you may find that differences in dialing method and assumptions, to take account of differences in agents skills, may actually lead to little variations in outputs. The best way to find out is to run campaigns to reflect the different assumptions and compare the outputs you get.
2) Coping with changes in campaign data
You will find, even with some predictive dialers, that the average talk time per hour your agents manage, may vary significantly across the day because of shifts in call outcomes. The length of individual talk times may also vary a lot across a day. This may not matter for small changes, but if you want to know how many agents to assign to achieve a stated amount of business, for particular shifts in the day, then it may matter.
Again the best way to find out if it does matter, is to experiment with Oceanic®. If the differences you get are substantial, then you may want to run shifts, in respect of the same calling list data, using different campaign assumptions and work schedules.
3) Deciding between day and evening shifts
Many call center managers would like to be able to switch resources away from dialing in the evening, to making more calls during the day. Reasons for this include making more effective use of fixed investment. For example, if a switch could be made from having say just seven agents at work in the afternoon, and twenty one in the evening to an average of say fourteen, at both times, then the size of call center required shrinks by one third.
Oceanic® can be used easily to investigate the economics of such a move, but with the proviso that you get your data inputs right. This is such an important issue that we have devoted a separate topic to it; see Day and Evening Shifts