How can I safeguard against Auto-Answer, auto ready

[Cathal O'Driscoll]

Hi All,

We have a contact centre who want to use auto answer with headset and also want to be made ready after the Agent finishes the call.  While the managers have requested this they are also worried that an Agent can walk away from their desk without making themselves not ready and the calls can be answered by the vacant desk

Besides the obvious solution of training their consultants correcty, would anyone have an idea on how to safeguard against this?  I was thinking of using some type of Voice Contact workflow that could perhaps log off the Agent automatically if for example they received 5 short calls in a row but can't really see how this is possible. If anyone had any good ideas it would be appreciated.  Perhaps something could be done at a call Manger level?

UCCE - ICM 7.5

Cheers

[Clifford McGlamry]

Either the agents have to better police themselves, or the supervisors will have to. 

Ultimately its a training and management issue that technology can't really fix.  But normally after 1 RONA the agent goes not ready.  Not sure if you could go for 5, but would you really want to do that?  That agent would likely get the same call queued to them 5 times in a row as the longest availble agent.

[Cathal O'Driscoll]

Thanks Clifford,

The problem is that there will be no RONA as the phones are set at auto-answer.  Assuming the consultant walks away from their desk, the call is answered but the caller just hears background noise and hangs up.  As per desk-settings and work flow group that they want, the Agent goes back to ready and the same thing occurs again.  The idea behind the 5 was that if the Agent takes 5 calls in a row that are under 20 secs for example, then could we either force the Agent in to a not-ready state or log them off completely.  I am guessing not

I agree that it is a management and training issue but the client wanted it looked into none the less.

Cheers

[Clifford McGlamry]

The problem is that workflows at the agent level look at ONE call, not statistical lookbacks. Supervisors can base workflows on aggregate numbers (i.e. callers in queue), but I don't know of any way to do what your customer is asking for.

In my experience, large call centers all do things the same way....because they work. The smaller the call center I work with, the more unusual I've found that their requests get. This one is kind of out there, and I'm betting it's likely an understaffed, smaller call center.

You can't fix pure manpower issues with technology...unfortunately. I wish we could, because we could earn a lot of money doing it.

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