WEEK 10 (7-11 JUNE)

Beginning of this week, my colleagues and I had a meeting with our boss. We discussed about all our task that have been done for the past 2 months. In the meeting, I have been briefed about call routing strategies and virtual contact center. Besides that, I was also given new tasks for the week.

 In the meeting room

Nowadays, someone in England can make a phone call to Australia, or that someone in United States can read web pages that are on a computer in Canada. A large network is affected by many factors which are often hard to predict. There can be busy and quiet periods through the day. For example, if a television program has a phone-in vote, there can be a sudden overload at one point in the network. This is when routing calls comes in handy. These routing schemes work by searching out the spare capacity in the network so as to route calls away from parts of the network that are broken or full and into parts that are underloaded.

Call routing strategies is divided into:-

• last agent
• round robin
• lowest total talk time
• fewest received calls

Last agent

Route new calls to the general queue and repeat calls to the last agent contacted with overflow to the general queue. In this routing strategy, calls that queue for a specific agent are overflowed to the general queue after a pre-set period of time (i.e, wait, 1, 10, 20 and 30 seconds for a specific agent). Repeat callers waiting for the last agent have a higher priority than general callers.

 last agent

Round robin

If more than one agent is available, the system will try the agent who goes after the last one who took a call in a round robin fashion. Imagine 3 agents are in a circle. A call comes in, and the first agent takes it. Next time a call comes in, agent 2 takes it. Next time it will be agent 3, and then back to agent 1, as long as all of them are available. This routing method is appropriate for situations when most calls are of comparable length and all agents need to take a comparable number of calls. In other words, it balances the load of incoming calls based on number of calls.

I also learned about contact center.

Virtual Call Centers

Skills Based Routing can be implemented as part of a much more elaborate call center scenario, the virtual call center. Several vendors are now providing fresh looks at how a virtual call center would operate within a network environment. The application sits on top of Centrex, central office or PBX environments, allowing agents from multiple geographic locations to log into a single virtual ACD environment. Think of it as an ACD without the equipment, but totally dependent on the public switched network. In this scenario, routing calls based on agent skills is a network requirement and easily implemented. Calls are labeled as a primary skill or a non-primary skill. Matching calls to agents becomes easier and less costly within the network and easier for the customer and less costly for the call center.

Vendor Approaches

There are a variety of companies providing products and services with special features focused on Skills Based Routing.

Blended Call Centers

Blended environments are call centers where inbound calls and outbound calls are handled by the same agents. Inbound call activities are assigned as one skill and outbound call activity is assigned to a second skill. Vendors supplying call routing systems for this environment may include enhanced ACD and IVR functions with CTI features.

Premise-Based Contact Center

Call center have been built on PBX equipment that is owned and hosted by the call center operator. The PBX might provide functions such as Automatic Call Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, and skills-based routing. The call center operator would be responsible for the maintenance of the equipment and necessary software upgrades as released by the vendor.

Lastly, I learned call queue and call distribution strategy.

• Call Queue is to offer customer the best waiting time possible.
• Call Distribution Strategy : supervise talk time (average 3 min) and supervise the etiquette of agents.