David Preece, Principal Solutions Consultant at QStory, and 28-year veteran of the contact centre planning industry, shares his thoughts on solving the back-office challenge.
It’s fair to say that, in the world of contact centres, information is King. It is vital to the success of the centre and to the relentless spinning of the planning cycle that we understand what drives our work, how long it takes to do a piece of work, how productive our agents are and what agents are actually doing versus their schedule. Oh, and about a million other data points are really useful, too.
Thankfully, information and data are not in short supply when agents are in a ‘live’ channel such as telephony or chat. There is a veritable feast of data points for analysts to gorge themselves on in these channels, helping the business to have visibility of every single thing that an agent does, every second of every single day.
And people like me who love splashing about in data have a whale of a time scuba-diving to great depths to find ever more insightful ways to use that visibility to bring clarity and eventually success to our businesses.
It’s a real pity that the same can’t be said for the back-office environment.
I mentioned a key word earlier: visibility. Unfortunately, planning for the back-office is often akin to trying to look for something in a room from behind a locked door – you know it’s in there somewhere, but you can’t access it and you definitely can’t see it. As a result, businesses often know almost nothing about how productive their back-office environment is. They don’t really know how many people they need, if the people they have are skilled correctly to handle the incoming work or, scarily, whether they are on the brink of disaster when it comes to service levels.
When I’ve been engaged in planning for back-office, one thing was abundantly clear to me – I could tell you the amount of work that we had outstanding right now, but I couldn’t reliably tell anyone how much work we would have outstanding in three days’ time or when our outstanding work was going to be so old that it was prompting follow up contacts from the customer. “Are we sailing through this or drowning?”, “Sorry, I just don’t know, I don’t have the visibility.”. “Do we have enough people?”, “Erm…Possibly. Probably. Almost Certainly…”. On top of this, agents in the back-office are being badly left behind in terms of schedule flexibility and the protection of the precious work/life balance.
Talking to friends throughout the industry, it seems like things haven’t really moved on in the intervening years – all the problems I encountered are still being faced today.
I reckon you’ve probably figured out where I’m going with this.
You see, I work for QStory, a company that looks at insurmountable problems, smiles to itself and gently shakes its head, rolls up its sleeves and engineers beautiful solutions. And I’m proud to say that we have done it again.
QStory has now developed a compelling new platform for your back-office environment that will:
- Provide your business with a three-dimensional, rounded view of your work-in-progress now and what that will look like in three days time, taking into account new incoming work and a whole raft of different service level goals.
- Allow you to prioritise and automatically distribute ‘packets’ of work to skilled and available agents to address service level concerns.
- Enable you to build back-office schedules to make sure that work is completed on time and give back-office agents the same levels of radical autonomy regarding working patterns that their front-office counterparts have.
- Provide a detailed view of back-office schedule adherence in a way that has simply not been possible before.
- Allow you to understand back-office productivity and, for the first time ever, really understand the true scale of your back-office environment.
QStory are busy solving the back-office challenge by applying brand-new thinking to address age-old problems. Want to see more? Get in touch with us and let us show you exactly how we can help your business to thrive.