At a Glance
About Agent Multi-Tasking
With Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC), agents can work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel, presented within the Agent Desktop, SCC’s unified web-based workspace.
Back when ‘contact centers’ were ‘call centers’, agents would handle voice calls in series; one would end, another would begin.
With the evolution of omnichannel and the addition of text-based media sessions that work on different timescales to voice sessions, agents can potentially work on several contact sessions simultaneously. This enables agents to multi-task, increasing productivity by cutting idle time.
Switch easily between live sessions
In SCCs Agent Desktop, agents can multi-task across multiple live text-based sessions – SMS, web chat, email, WhatsApp or any other social messaging – at any one time. And a voice session may be added when necessary, popping into a work tab in the same way as text sessions. This allows agents to work on the task with the highest value at that time, i.e. a voice session, or the text session with the longest wait time. Any live session may be worked on by simply switching between tabs.
An agent can upgrade any conversation to a different channel, e.g. a chat session to a voice session, at the click of a button.
Improving agent productivity
Multi-tasking greatly improves agent utilisation. Agent idle time is virtually eliminated, and reliance on workforce management predictions greatly reduced.
With Agent Desktop, in order to switch between media channels, agents don’t have to log out of one and into another. Traversing channels is easy and instant, so they can be more productive. And with all media channels presented in the same tool with the same look and feel, agents no longer have to learn how to navigate multiple systems, reducing agent training costs.
By providing a varied and refreshing work load across all media channels, in an effective multi-session environment, the agent’s job is more interesting and rewarding. This makes for happier, more productive agents, ready to provide great service, who are more likely to flourish, and less likely to leave.
Tailoring workflow for each agent
Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, supervisors can specify how many sessions of each media channel each agent is allowed to handle concurrently, taking their particular strengths and weaknesses into account, e.g. they may excel in sales rather than service, or web chat rather than email, or just one chat at a time rather than three.
In this way, agents are set up to succeed, achieving their full potential, and businesses benefit from the highest possible productivity from each agent.
To learn more about how SCC balances the work load across all media channels, see Dynamic Workforce Management
