Best Practices - Email Notifications

The purpose of Call Centre Best Practices is for managers to be able to improve the call centre productivity and efficiencies. Productivity and efficiency improvements begin with the agents. By following best practices for each application the call centre improvements will happen.  The best practices will help you run an effective inbound, outbound or blended call centre.

This is an enewsletter copy of the Best Practices for Agent Desktops.  Visit the Spectrum website or SlideShare for the full version.

Email – What we would ever do without it today.  For those of us old enough to remember doing business without email we are very thankful for this communications method.  In the past we would call in or wait until we arrive at the office to find out all of the good or bad news.  When we received our stack of telephone messages or messages from the boss we did not know if this was urgent or just checking in.

Email over the years has changed and improved.  Some of the changes are welcome, Emails to smartphones, and some of the changes, spam, are not so welcome.  Fortunately we can quickly see what spam is and stop it from occurring. But there are emails that we need to see if the reasons for the message are relevant. 

Email notifications can be in multiple formats.  Best Practices recommend keeping your email notifications limited to key information, critical information and data that will help you improve your performance.

• Daily and Weekly Notifications with performance data
• Advanced Threshold alerts
• Subject line data
• Key people only for emails

Daily and weekly notifications that include overall performance data are the email notifications that mobile managers should be receiving.  The business goals and targets that you are looking to stay aware of are the ones that you should be receiving.  It is not a best practice to state which data you should be receiving because each business is unique.

The amount of data in the email is your decision.  The layout of the data should be from most important, at the top, to least important at the bottom. The overall look of the email layout is your decision.  It could also be based on if you are reading this email primarily on your smartphone.

Advanced threshold alerts or combined threshold alerts are the only threshold emails that should be sent.  Imagine getting an email every time there is a call waiting. Instead use an advanced or combined threshold setting.  For example: There is a call waiting, it has been waiting for 30 seconds and there are agents available for that group.  At that point go ahead and send a message to the group supervisor.  The email alert can be triggered based off of other singular level threshold violations if they are truly critical to the business.

The email alerts are a business decision.  The objective is to be aware of conditions while you or other key people are away from the business.  As a manager you are under constant pressure to improve the contact center. Yet you are required to attend remote meetings and can lose track of the status of the operations.  Having threshold alerts sent to you allows you to remotely react quickly.

The importance of reacting is to be sure you are doing so only when the conditions are at the level that requires your intervention.

Receiving an email that has data in the subject line will save you time. As an example if we were to receive an email alert from a combined KPI threshold alert and the information were in the subject line we would not have to open the email, read it and then respond.  If we are aware of the conditions that will cause this email we now know something critical is going on back in the office. We can then check in to find out what is causing this problem.

The email may also be a daily message showing you overall performance. But to you there is a single key item that you want to know about.  That piece of data can be the subject line. The subject line could be Sales revenue for the day, call volume, tickets opened, total talk time or total abandoned calls.  The choice of the subject line data is yours to make.

Emails should be sent to the people that will respond to them or need to be aware of the content of the email.  Emails should not be sent just to give out information.  If the receiving person is not going to do anything with the information they have received then they should not have the email sent to them.

Outsourcing companies at times send emails providing daily and / or weekly results of key statistics.  What is nice about this approach is the email is coming directly from the reporting package software and is therefore real time, accurate and is sent out on time.

Emails can be very helpful to a dynamic call center.  If your business has you mobile often then email notifications and alerts are a best practice to follow. Spectrum is a leading provider of Unified Contact Center Reporting.  Contact Spectrum today to discuss best practices.  For more examples of reporting visit our website and the products page. http://www.specorp.com/products

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Dan Boehm
VP Sales and Marketing
Spectrum
dboehm@specorp.com
+1 713 986 8839

Best Practices - Web Based Reporting

The purpose of Call Centre Best Practices is for managers to be able to improve the call centre productivity and efficiencies. Productivity and efficiency improvements begin with the agents. By following best practices for each application the call centre improvements will happen.  The best practices will help you run an effective inbound, outbound or blended call centre.

This is an enewsletter copy of the Best Practices for Agent Desktops.  Visit the Spectrum website or SlideShare for the full version.

There are many challenges for the manager and supervisors including the need to be remote and yet be fully aware of the status of the contact center.  The status needs to be from real time urgent alerts to historical reports that the manager can drill down and see performance by the agent over the past year. Remote access is a critical key to manager’s ability to run the contact center.

Web Based Reporting Best Practices explain how to be able to work remote and still be aware of the status and performance of the contact center.  Group and agent real time and historical data is all available to the manager that has taken advantage of the Best Practices of web based reporting.

• Summary Data
• Drill Down Capabilities to more detailed information
• Real time and historical data
• True remote access

Summary data on a web report is group level data. The data should be combined multi-channel data (See Manager Dashboard Best Practices) for each group within the contact center.  The web report should follow the Manager Dashboard Best Practices and include the key metrics for the groups.  The key metrics for every business varies; however, the metrics that most customers ask Spectrum for on their reports are the following:

• Total Offered Calls / Emails / Chats
• Total Handled Calls / Emails / Chats
• Total Abandoned Calls
• Total Abandoned Time
• Total Trouble Tickets
• Total Talk Times
• Service Levels for Calls / Emails / Chats
• Total unavailable States (Not Ready, ACW)

By clicking on a specific group name the manager would be able to drill down to the critical threshold data.

• Voice and Emails In Queue or waiting to be replied to
• Longest wait time for Voice
• Longest reply time for Email
• Abandonment Rate for Voice
• Service Level
• Average Speed of Answer
• Average Reply time to Email
• Chats on Hold
• Agents Available
• Total contacts (voice and email)

Best practices for web reporting begin with summary data access so the manager is able to determine immediately the status of the call center.

Drill down seems like a standard feature for web based reporting. The important point to this is to be able to get to specific data and not just click on a tab on top of the web report.  These links should take you from summary group level data to group level metrics, threshold metrics, agent status and agent historical data.

This collage example shows a customer going from the summary to agent group to agent historical reporting.

The first page of this web report is a mixture of Voice data only.  For this customer most of their critical customer contact was via phone.  However, as you can see in the second page of this web report the also communicate with customers through email.  By clicking on the group name the manager is able to drill down one level to see the metrics for that group.  Metrics are valuable to the manager but are not critical.

Clicking again and the manager is able to see the agent and their status for that group.  By showing agent states the managers are aware of overall agent status for all groups and including logged out of voice but logged into email.

Finally by clicking on an agent the manager can see the real time and historical performance for the agent.  In this case the historical is one year.  The best practices for this page are the collection of productive (working states) and non-productive (non-working states) status.  This is key to having a successful web report.

The report has the data going back one day, week, month, three months, six months, nine and twelve months.  There is tremendous importance to these time frames.  The day, week and month show current performance status for the agent and enable the manager to respond quickly to any complaints about the agent or even from the agent about their performance.

The long term historical data gives the manager an opportunity to review how the agent has performed over a long period of time, under different conditions and different cyclical time periods.  Agents that are trying get your attention by performing well cannot maintain that level for an entire year unless they have been and will continue to that level of performance.

Agent and group level historical reporting is valuable to the manager whenever they need to provide proof of the overall and down to agent level performance.  Showing this cyclical data to senior management provides back up to the managers opinion to how well the call center is doing for the business.

True remote access to the report can be difficult for some contact centers.  Internal security may not allow for true remote access to the web based report and therefore only internal web reports are available.  This is not a best practices discussion but rather an ideal situational preference for all managers.  Having remote access to a report even from a hotel or airport PC is a nice to have.

The problem with complete remote access is the firewall security that may not allow access to the report.  These security settings typically mean that intranet reporting is put in place so a manager is able to see the report(s).  It does not matter to best practices whether the reporting is restricted by the username and password or intranet reporting.  The importance is security is in place and only the correct people are able to see these reports.

Summary data with drill down to real time and historical data is best practices method for web based reporting. Spectrum is a leading provider of Unified Contact Center Reporting.  Contact Spectrum today to discuss best practices.  For more examples of reporting visit our website and the products page. http://www.specorp.com/products

Follow Spectrum Corporation:

• SlideShare
• LinkedIn
• Blog

Dan Boehm
VP Sales and Marketing
Spectrum
dboehm@specorp.com
+1 713 986 8839