At a Glance
Blends agents to deal with inbound spikes
Balances work load, across all media channels
360 degree view of all relevant factors
Enables best use of agent/ supervisor time
What is Dynamic Workforce Management
Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) automatically blends agents across inbound/ outbound work and balances the work load of customer contact sessions, across all media channels.
This dynamic workforce management addresses two priorities of every customer-facing organisation:
- minimising the time customers spend waiting to be served
- minimising the time agents spend waiting for work.
Addressing a complex challenge
Back when ‘contact centers’ were ‘call centers’, and agents handled one voice call at a time, this balance was maintained by automated call blending – having agents do outbound work, moving them over to inbound when demand spiked, and moving them back again when demand decreased.
With the rise in expectation for contact across all media channels – voice, email, chat, social, etc – the software challenge is much more complex. As well as having to balance inbound/ outbound workloads, the software must also balance across different media channels with very different performance measurement points. For instance, chat SLAs may govern both initial response time and time taken to send a message to a customer while chatting.
To successfully balance priorities in this environment, software must respond to a variety of demands. For example:
- Bringing in chat agents to handle voice sessions during peak periods
- The trade-offs to be made on between voice and chat SLAs
- Balancing multiple queues across many different projects
- Multi-disciplinary agents with different skills across lots of workloads
- Some agents will be better than others at handling multiple sessions.
The Automatic Session Distributor (ASD®)
To address these challenges, right at the core of the Sytel solution is an engine that manages dynamic workforce management in real-time: the Automatic Session Distributor (ASD®). The ASD® is the multi-media/ multi-session extension to the traditional call center ACD.
Blending and balancing work load
SCC automatically blends agents across inbound/ outbound work and the ASD load-balances customer contact sessions across all media channels.
1. Agent blending
But wouldn’t taking agents off an outbound voice campaign cause a spike in abandoned calls?
No, because SCC’s dialing algorithm takes account of all campaign conditions including agent numbers. It automatically and instantaneously adjusts the dialing rate accordingly, so that outbound predictive dialing performance is not compromised.
2. Balancing work load, across all media channels
The ASD automatically assigns contact sessions to agents with the most appropriate skillsets, or even previous interaction with the customer, and capacity within their personal workload to handle them.
During slack periods of inbound activity, agents can be kept busy with less time-critical work, e.g. email. At peak times, they can be moved up the value chain in response to demand, and back again when demand allows.
Automatic ‘best-available’ decisions
SCC’s dynamic workforce management allows real-time, ‘best-available’ decisions by:
- transforming all sessions into an equivalent format, so that all sessions can be distributed, analysed and worked on using the same mechanisms
- having central, 360 degree, real-time access to data on all activities and resources within the system – agent skills, sessions in progress, identity of caller, SLA targets, wait times, etc.
Improving performance across the organisation
Dynamic workforce management improves performance for customers, agents and supervisors by:
- reducing the time any customer has to wait in a queue by automatically moving agents where possible to handle the load
- automatically minimising agent idle time, with the scope for productivity improvements of 20% or more
- automatically adhering to any and all SLAs, protecting organisational reputation and keeping customers happy by not keeping them waiting
- making the best use of supervisor time and skills. The supervisor simply ensures that SSC knows what skills agents have, sets appropriate SLAs per queue, and can focus on getting the best from their agents, not the technology.
- making ‘best-available’ decisions far more efficiently and accurately than any supervisor, so human error is minimised if not eliminated altogether
- allowing organisations to rethink their legacy WFM systems. The ASD® provides workforce planning outputs that allow you to plan staffing, but will also manage the media landscape in real-time to ensure 100% occupancy, regardless of peaks and troughs in call, chat and email volumes.
- enabling organisations to be more agile and flexible, adding channels and workflows without worrying about detrimental effects to existing work.
Explore more of SCC’s capabilities:
Latest posts
Intraday Automation – Real-Time Workforce Management
Real-Time Automation for Workforce Management (WFM)
AI and Automation in the Contact Center – Part 2
AI and Automation in the Contact Center – Part 1
Predictive Dialing and Cell Phones – A Way Forward
