How to Utilize Pockets of Time Without Risking Service Levels

In this episode of QStory’s Dear Dave, Solution Consultant Dave Preece explains how you can re-invest hundreds of hours’ worth of idle time into training for your agents.

I’m here to answer your questions about intraday automation and how it can benefit you and your contact centre.

The Problem

Now I’m going to look at how your business can utilize pockets of idle time, without posing any risk to your service levels.

So this is a problem that I’m sure you’re all really familiar with, it’s well known that even in the leanest run organizations there’ll be pockets of idle time dotted throughout the day.

This is because the shifts that your agents work cannot exactly match the level of work that you need to complete on the day.

This is called shift inflexibility, and it’s an unavoidable truth for contact centres worldwide. So for years and years, we’ve all known that these pockets of time are there, but it’s proved impossible to be quick and agile enough to get access to them so that they can be used for something much more productive like training, communications, and coaching sessions.

No matter how quick your real-time team is, they’ll never be able to harvest enough of that spare time for your business to make productive use of. And that’s where QStory comes in.

Heads Up Display

Let me show you how intraday automation can help you to transform your business and power a better every day.

Let’s take a look – so this is the heads up display dashboard in QStory’s software. This screen shows you up to the minute levels of demand and supply in your business.

Where we have a staffing shortfall the graph is shaded red, where we’ve got too many staff in because of shift inflexibility the graph is shaded blue.

QStory not only knows the levels of supply and demand though, it also knows the skills and competencies of all the agents and their training, and development needs.

So armed with all of this information, QStory makes recommendations for changes that you can make to the schedule to make best use of your time whilst protecting service levels

Scheduling Agent Training

So here our software has found about 200 hours of opportunities to schedule this vital training session. It’s provided the names of the agents, and the suggested times that this training is carried out.

Real-time teams or planning managers can simply select these recommendations, and QStory notifies agents of the change in their schedule, notifies the team leader to make sure that they’re kept in the loop, and automatically updates the agent’s schedule in the WFM system.

With zero effort we’ve just booked in 180 hours of mandatory training for about 300 agents, with no manual administration work needed after the fact. Quick, simple, agile.

Author: Guest Author