Call Center Solution: Make Average Speed of Answer More Uniform
CentreVu® Advocate Release 8 User Guide
Implementation
7-2
Implementation
7
To improve the ASA for a skill, the pool of nurse-agents assigned to the
skill must be increased in some way. Initially, cross-training nurses to
handle calls from many skills will increase the size of the agent pools
without having to hire more nurses, which would drive costs up. Another
way to increase the size of the available agent pool is to make agents
with more specialized skills more available to take calls. Previous to
implementing this solution, adding agents to skills meant increasing their
work load to give them higher occupancy, which lead to agent burnout.
Once nurses have been cross-trained, a combination of agent and call
selection using
CentreVu Advocate should be implemented to evenly
distribute calls while improving and/or equalizing ASA in the call center
without driving costs up.
Option A: Agent
Selection
7
All skills are administered with Uniform Call Distribution-Least Occupied
Agent (UCD-LOA). UCD-LOA distributes the work load across all skills,
giving all callers a comparable level of service and call answer time.
Option B: Agent
Selection
7
All skills are administered with Expert Agent Distribution-Least Occupied
Agent (EAD-LOA) to select the least occupied agent. Skill levels are
defined as the number of skills assigned to the agent, rather than the
level of expertise within a skill; for example, nurses with three skills have
skill level: 3 assigned for each skill. Nurses with only one skill (and a skill
level of 1) will be selected first. Nurses who are new are given an
artificially high skill level to lower their occupancy while they are being
trained. These nurses should not be set at a skill level of 1 so that they
will receive fewer calls while training.
Call Selection
7
Agents are assigned a call handling preference of Greatest Need
without
Service Objective to select the call that has been waiting longest in
queue. Use Predicted Wait Time if your skills vary in size, to balance wait
time between these specialized skills and large skills. Predicted Wait
Time will improve ASA for the smaller, specialized skills.
