On the merits of reversing the Contact Center wall-board

A significant element of any contact centre solution are “Statistics” and a varied range of tools for providing real-time, near real-time as well as historic reports. These are obviously designed with their core focus on helping the operational contact centre manage the delivery of ‘resources’ versus their customers ‘demand’.

The 3 main statistical elements delivered in typical contact centres are;

• The Wall Board – a place for real-time as well as near real time statistics – the performance of the contact centre versus current or near real-time demand
• The Supervisors desktop – a place for the team leader and supervisors to manage their teams adherence to Service Levels and Key Performance Indicators
• The Business Analysts – for historic reporting, business intelligence and analytics

We see these 3 mainstays being supported by new features in Genesys Interaction Workspace for example, that expose additional layers of statistics to each agent. These include;

• A statistics Widget – where key metrics can be published or even ‘pinned’ by the customer service representative
• A My Statistics TAB in their desktop application that shows how the team, or the entire Contact Centre is peforming (much like the historic wall board, but now they can be skill specific)
• A holistic Call Centre statistical view that expresses the performance of the contact centre as a whole

So, I’d argue, every single facet of the modern contact centre has lots of information about how how demand is being met by the resources available.  A new concept I’d like to discuss here is the concept of reversing the statistical role so that they can be used by customer to make decisions in real-time.  For example;

• Are there resources available to help me right now?
• If so, how can I reach that pool of resources?
• If there’s a delay, how long is it?
• Do I have alternative options?

In the Anana Mobile Application for Customer Service, which we based on the Genesys Customer Interaction Management Platform we have modelled the simple presentation of currently available agents by skill.  Study the picture carefully for a moment…

Which channel or media type would you pick?

Scenario A – You are in a rush, and your need to engage with customer services is very high priority. Which Channel would you pick?

Scenario B – You are less hurried, and have an important matter to engage about, but it could wait if it needed to.  Which Channel would you pick?

Scenario C – You have all the time in the world, and the matter to engage about is less than important. Which Channel would you pick?

I think the answers to these options could actually be quite profound.

In Scenario A I may opt for the phone, simply because in a rush, whilst running about with my mobile phone, I can actually talk and walk at the same time. I might not decide to phone though if I can NO agents available to help me.  This brings in all sorts of additional options, like “Publishing expected WAIT times”.

In Scenario B I would probably choose web-chat.  Why? Because I can type pretty fast and I can see that there are more Agents available there

In Scenario C I would probably pick the channel that is most convenient to my situation/device; but only if there were people there to help.  Even though I don’t mind waiting; once I’ve know what available I may start to take more notice of it.  I’d probably still choose to use email, or ask for a call-back.  If I was on Twitter or Facebook I may use those.  SMS may work too as there’s a lot of people available to help me!