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Hi all -

I'm hoping to get thoughts on how to handle scheduling of one on one's. I have been doing them but it's been inconsistent because my reps are in a phone queue and the call volume is constantly shifting across the day/week/month. I want to make the committment to my team to have these reguarly but I'm not sure how to balance this against our business and customer needs.

Any thoughts, suggestions or experiences would be most appreciated.

thanks!

bflynn's picture

[quote="dman"]Hi all -

I'm hoping to get thoughts on how to handle scheduling of one on one's. I have been doing them but it's been inconsistent because my reps are in a phone queue and the call volume is constantly shifting across the day/week/month. I want to make the committment to my team to have these reguarly but I'm not sure how to balance this against our business and customer needs.

Any thoughts, suggestions or experiences would be most appreciated.

thanks![/quote]

Do you have the ability to take a rep out of the queue? I cannot think of a better way to send the message that O3s are important. They're so important that we will stop your work to do them, regardless of the call volume. Unless you only have 2-3 reps on the queue, taking one person off the queue won't make a huge difference.

I'm hearing that you have ranked the importance of O3s vs answering calls and believe the calls are more important. What Mark said about your schedule holds true for your direct's schedule too. O3s are not to be skipped. They are one of the most important thing that you do. Short of a literal life altering crisis, O3s should take priority over normal work. They're only an hour a week. Your employees will be more efficient and more than make up for that hour.

Brian

lou's picture

I agree with bflynn. O3s are very important so you need to have them scheduled in advance so you can both prepare, and you need to communicate how important they are to the employees. The only way to do that is to pull them out of the queue for 30 minutes for the O3.

Look at your call volume statistics and find the common lull periods and schedule for those times.

You should take care in your initial O3 communication to your employees to mention that you'll be pulling them out of the queue for 30 minutes for these meetings, and that call volume will need to be handled by everyone else for that 30 minutes. It's an issue that you'll need to acknowledge but after they see the value you shouldn't have many complaints.

stroker's picture

You'll probably need to do more than that. Depending on how large your inbound queue is, you'll need to think about overall staffing levels and what assumption for off phone time are baked into the staffing model. If you have a control desk/workforce team, they should be able to figure this out for you. It will be unlikely that zero off phone time is baked in. As for shceduling them consistently, you'll have to work that out with the workforce team. They probably have service levels and staffing efficiency baked into their goals. Get to know them better and they'll hook you up for sure.

You'll be in luck if your team works evening shift. Volume tends to drop down to the point that you might be overstaffed, and makes it easier to pull people off the phones. But if you're in peak hour schedules, will be a little harder.

dman's picture

thank you all for your input. It is a smaller team of 8 so as we go into our busy season it will be felt by the reps to have one person out of the queue. I'll probably spread them across all 5 days to ease the load and not cut into the lunch 'zone'. What do y'all think?

stroker's picture

If you can look at historical data, you can probably find trends on low call volume periods. At 30 mins. vs. a 40 hour work week, there should be a way to get it done. With a small queue to work with, it'll be difficult to handle spikes in call arrival. Perhaps it will justify an additional FTE if things like weekly O3s are not built into your current capacity model. But, of course hiring additional manpower will require approval or whatever as it is additional cost, so easier said than done.

You can make a case for it in terms of ROI or cost benefit. Think about potential improvements in work efficiency vs. the time taken off queue or the cost of an additional resource. Also depends on what your service level commitments are, revenue generation targets, etc. Really depends on the nature of your inbound queue.

[If you haven't picked up on it yet, i'm in the contact center industry/BPOs and have managed small and large queues, hope the insights i'm sharing are useful.]