QueueTips
QueueTips is an interactive question-and-answer forum where contact center professionals can view and post answers to
various contact center problems, issues, or concerns. Below are the current open questions for the month.
New QueueTips Questions
(0 Responses)
published on 3/8/2010
submitted by Laura
Does anyone have a metric on the breakout of chat volume by time of day? Does it tend to follow the same pattern as inbound calls intraday and intraweek?
Responses
No responses have been submitted yet.
(0 Responses)
published on 3/8/2010
submitted by Michael Pace
I am looking for a chat benchmarking study to understand a few metrics:
- Chat satisfaction
- # of concurrent chats per agent
- Chat systems
Responses
No responses have been submitted yet.
(0 Responses)
published on 3/8/2010
submitted by James Livesay
What is the most effective calculation for service level?
Responses
No responses have been submitted yet.
(0 Responses)
published on 3/8/2010
submitted by Dale Hagadone
Our current call center set up with our vendor is:
-5 lines of business, collectively
-220 agents
-40 support staff
-190 seat center
-Hours of operation -- 03:00 to 21.30 HST.
As you can see, we are a small center, and are questioning whether we are able to leverage the business practices of larger centers, or if in fact it would be detrimental to our business.
Size is a significant factor when determining the best business practice for our environment.
Consideration of a split call center environment (two sites instead of the current single site same vendor)?
o Benefits
o Better business continuity in the event of disaster
o Mores resources for hiring
o Challenges
o Requires additional visits for HA management team for on site audits
How to split the lines of business, currently areas are cross utilized for efficiencies
o Additional expense?
Consideration for multi vendor environment?
o Benefits
o Two vendors competing for business share
o Competition for best performance
o Challenges
o Expense to set up second vendor
o Having 2 significantly small call centers may devalue the business to the vendor
o Requires additional visits for HA management team of on site audits
How many companies have actually changed outsourced vendors to another outsourced vendor due to dissatisfaction?
How many companies have closed outsourced vendors due to dissatisfaction and reopened on shore facilities?
How do you manage the following:
o Measuring the sacrifice of quality as compared to previous on shore call centers
o Language barrier issues
o Attrition
o Product knowledge challenges
o Continuous changes in management and staffing due to vendor growth
Is there a significant difference in performance between call center vendors of similar size? Or is overall performance similar across all companies?
o Are performance issues for off shore similar across the board?
o Recommendation for onsite visits? How frequently should a client be visiting their call center?
o How many SLA’s are recommended in an outsourced contract? How many KPI’s are recommended in an outsourced contract?
o What are the top SLA’s in an outsourced contract for a sales and service environment such as a reservations call center?
Responses
No responses have been submitted yet.
(0 Responses)
published on 3/8/2010
submitted by Sudipto Chowdhury
How can we reduce the average handle time (AHT) of our agents ?
Responses
No responses have been submitted yet.
(0 Responses)
published on 3/8/2010
submitted by
When looking at staff availability, is there a % of available time that is deemed acceptable?
Responses
No responses have been submitted yet.
(0 Responses)
published on 3/8/2010
submitted by C. Schmuecker
Does anyone know of a calculator that will convert an ASA (Average speed of Answer) metric to a service level? I have a workforce management system that requires a service level for scheduling, but our metric is ASA. I need help with this conversion. In other words, what does a 60 second ASA equate to in a service level, and does a calculator like this even exist?
Responses
No responses have been submitted yet.
New QueueTips Responses
(6 Responses)
published on 6/1/2002
submitted by
We are starting to develop a quality monitoring program for our email servicing. We do not yet provide email servicing, so I would be intrerested in hearing about some of the sampling and monitoring practices that many of you may be currently employing in your contact centers. Here are are couple of questions: - How many or what percentage of emails are monitored and scored on a monthly basis, per agent?
- Do you have full-time quality specialists to monitor email only, or do they also monitor telephone calls?
- How do you select emails for monitoring? Do you use a quality monitoring system to randomly select emails for review?
- Are your agents email or telephone specific, or are they blended to handle both?
Any feedback on this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. -- Jeff Palkowski, Metavante Corporation
Responses
(new)
3/8/2010
Linda Brown
Approximately 10% of each analyst's emails are monitored on a monthly basis by the Sr. Team Leads and myself as the Director. If an analyst has received a client complaint via email, then we may elect to monitor this analyst's emails more often (say 40-50% more for a given month). It's extremely time-consuming to provide resources to monitor emails.
We don't have dedicated resources to monitor email only, per se; we encourage self-monitoring, we do intermittent trainings, provide professional templates and intermittently review email content to our client base -- this seems to result in approximately a 98% success rate of quality emails going out to our clients. We occasionally have team competitions where the best emails sent to clients on a consistent and sustained basis can earn our analysts some prizes (days off, work from home days, etc.).
Our staff has to manage both phones and email. 90% of our client issues arrive via email, 10% via phones, and we also provide client voicemail, which is monitored each half hour. Hence, we have a blended team that seems to work quite well for this type of environment. The phones aren't ringing off the hooks, but when they do during our busy season, we then assign half the analysts to phones and the other half to email only.
We don't use any hard fast rules for selecting emails for monitoring. We have found that even the simplest emails can contain errors even with a template. We just choose an analyst and proceed.
We don't have a formal process for 'scoring' if you will. I just think some things in support environments are too highly monitored and associates begin to feel like they are just here to produce numbers. It's all so subjective, if you have spelling mistakes, poor grammar, are discourteous, I mean, how do you score this? Either it's mild issues in the email, some a bit more than mild, and some egrigeous. We just counsel and/or retrain the analyst to provide a better script the next time and monitor them for a while. Been doing this for 11 years now and it works great for us.
I think I would set up some basic policies around your email handling, such as, we handle emails on a FIFO (first in-first out) basis, if an issue is critical and it's highlighted in the subject field, we may handle it first o a "cherry-picking" basis; see how it goes and tweak as necessary. I have found that we've edited our policy at least 2-3 times in years in small increments. You need to determine what process best meets the client's demands and the needs of your team to perform successfully.
11/10/2006
Roshan Shah
In view of the fact that I may by very late to place my comments, I happened to browse the net and found the topic interesting and thought I could post my views. Please accept my apologies if my comments are not be specific and or to the point.
Customers prefer to email their query as they need quick and precise response. So it is also important to know what the time is taken to respond to a query / email.
Understanding the above questions, we first need to know who we are servicing for.
• Is the service directly from the company to its customers, or
• Is this monitoring system for an outsourced email project?
We know that a customer can query about anything and everything. So if we are looking at the email service from the point of view of the company, then it would be better to limit the number of characters that a customer can query in one email. By this, no doubt there may be a 5-7% increase in the volumes of emails you receive; however they (Customers) will be precise in their queries. By doing this and as we receive queries to the point we can/ may have standard responses emailed to the customers for their queries. This will help consistency in replies to all customers. This may also solve the quality issue. Of course, there should be quality monitoring, but at this time I would second the option posted by Ms. Anushree Sharma about a random percentage to be checked. This will need less people for quality monitoring.
If the monitoring system is for an outsourced email project, then there are a few important questions that first need to be addressed. Below are few questions:
• What are the volumes (Daily/ weekly/ monthly) forecasted?
• What is the total strength actioning these emails (number of staff)?
• Divide the volumes forecasted into simple emails and complex emails.
• How many emails are free formats (Email actioned by free hand response)
• What is the time limit by which these emails need to be actioned (service level or response time agreement)
• Do you want to have full time Quality checking
etc...
I think as each quality person deployed for checking costs money to the company we need to carefully explore all areas and then decide. There have to be key statistics in place for doing the root cause analysis. An hourly dashboard should be in place so as to see volumes/ accuracy every hour. All agents on the floor can view this updated report and improve their results in the next hour. -- Roshan Shah, Siemens Information Processing Services
10/6/2006
Amor B
We are also starting to develop a quality monitoring program for our email service. The information provided by others is a big help. However, I'm interested to know more about the monitoring systems used by others. What are the things you look for and the rating system used? -- Amor B, ICT
11/1/2004
<anonymous>
Realized that the question was posted some time ago, but maybe some more information would be useful. - The Quality Assurance sampling rate for all new agents is initially pegged at 100%. That means ALL their mails are quality checked. This exercise is well worth the investment made up front. Fortunately, their throughput is low initially. Any errors they commit are typically fixed by quick huddles at the start of next day. As the performance of the agents improves, the QC (quality check) percentage is reduced gradually (typically over 8 weeks) to a minimum of 10%. In September, 18% of all our mails out were quality checked.
- We have full time Quality Analysts (QA) who monitor the quality of email. We have separate QAs to monitor telephone calls. This is because the parameters on which an interaction is analyzed are radically different for text and voice. Even the profile and selection criteria of quality analysts differ.
- The selection of email for quality checking is random and automated. If an agent is set to 10% QC and he sends out 100 mails in a day, 10 mails will be selected randomly for QC. This score is then normalized to 100 (his total output).
- Blending hasn’t worked well for us. We hire, train and deploy separately.
How do all the rest of you do it? -- Anushree Sharma
2/1/2003
<anonymous>
I really appreciated Rebecca Gibson's response to this question. I, too, will be starting to monitor customer email correspondence. The sample form she provided is a great start. I will be adding a category relating to the length of an email. Because the majority of our email to customers concerns product questions, it is easy to provide too much information. Email correspondence should be as short and concise as possible. -- Donna Beran
8/1/2002
<anonymous>
These are great questions to be considering and I applaud the time and care you're taking before you begin your email quality monitoring. When approaching this new communication channel, you'll find that, with a little common sense, the processes that you've put in place for your telephone monitoring will serve you well. Before you attempt to put your monitoring form together, take some time with your staff to determine what makes a quality email -- from the call center's perspective and from the customer's viewpoint. What will leave your customers feeling satisfied and eager to interact with your center again? Using these criteria, you can create a form that meaningfully measures the customer experience. When you develop your new form, work toward one that is similar in tone and logic (scoring system, formatting) to your telephone monitoring form, especially if either your agents or your monitors will be using both. This will encourage consistency in the level of service between the multiple channels within your call center. Some of the skills you'll require may transfer from the telephone channel -- for example, "customer-focused approach" or "offering empathy" -- while others will be unique -- such as "brief and clear writing style" or "accurately interprets customer concern."
Regards,
Rebecca Gibson
(1 Response)
published on 2/22/2010
submitted by
What is the standard by which After Call Work/Wrap Up is measured?
Responses
(new)
3/8/2010
Richard Natoli
ACW is typically the measurement of the "work" time needed to close out a customer call. Many phone systems calculate average work time in relation to the call that immediately preceded the work status.
Many people will look for industry standards or benchmarks when developing an appropriate standard for their own call centers. In reality, this is perhaps the worst way to set your own standards. I have taken a different approach. I have done time studies on my most "productive" representatives. Through these studies I was able to identify inefficient practices and streamline the process. Once complete, I used their ACW average as the expectation for the department (after all, don't we want people to strive to be efficient?).
The important thing to remember about taking this approach is that you need some leeway for other representatives, and for forecasting/staffing. For example, if your top reps average 100 seconds of ACW, you may hold all reps to that goal. However, I would recommend a tiered scoring for performance. Perhaps 100-111 seconds falls into the "achieving expectations category". For staffing calculations, make sure you use the actual average work time for the department rather than this goal metric. The difference between a 100 second ACW and the actual 122 second average can often result in serious staffing variances.
I hope this helps.
(1 Response)
published on 2/22/2010
submitted by kristen
Does anyone have statistic on having a 3rd party call center trained in person vs webinar for our program. We are hiring out a first level support call center to handle our new marketing program. The agent will use scripts and FAQS to answer questions. My question is wether we should go in person to train or if a webinar would suffice?
We have never used this company before and the agents have no familiarity with our company.
Responses
(new)
3/8/2010
Jeff Roberts
I can share some data and real -world experience. The 2009-2010 US Contact Center Decison-Makers Guide ranks the perceived effectiveness of training types by hundreds of contact center decision makers. In order they are: Real-world call-taking; Mentoring; Buddying; e-Learning and Classroom lectures.
However, everyone learns diiferently, and ideally we should endeavor to teach each agent in at least three ways -- by telling (lecturing), letting them read on their own, and by having them handle real or simulated calls. This can be expensive, so many organizations rely on one method and usually the one with the least cost. In our experience, even the most straight-forward engagement needs some direct interaction between the client (trainer) and our agents, as we want to build rapport and trust for future interactions and training opportunities. We usually insist on a minimum of two hours of in-person training with the clients' training staff. This makes the agents more comfortable asking questions right from the start, as they know who they are asking and can build some expectations of how their questions will be received and handled later. Also, the room dynamics are better when training is done live and in person, making for better questions and answers between agents and trainers. We add webinars and simple documentation updates and ad hoc training notes later on. The more complex the engagement or the product to be supported, the more formal and hands-on the training needs to be.
Let me know if I can help further.
Jeff Roberts
VP, Client Services, Inforonics
(2 Responses)
published on 2/22/2010
submitted by Karen
What would be best way to evaluate quality if the call center is email based( all correspondance is based on incoming and outrgoing emails), what type of metric should we looking at besides Email Etiquette? are there any guidelines to be followed?
Responses
(new)
3/8/2010
Jean Story
We use the same standards for email QA as we do for correspondence QA. Included in that are problem identification (what's the issue and was it addressed appropriately) and appropriate resolution, in addition to whatever system work is needed to deal with the account and the response back to the customer.
(new)
3/8/2010
<anonymous>
Our company is also email based and we have set up a form based on what our customers and we think are important. The first area we look at is the formatting of the email -- greeting, intro, structure, etc. The next area is product knowledge -- all questions answered, correct info, solution, etc. The third area covers language and style -- spelling, grammar, empathy, professionalism, etc.
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