It’s not always easy to find the perfect balance between affirming agents’ rights to take breaks and recharge and ensuring optimal productivity for the whole center. The challenge comes into sharp focus when considering what to do with agent idle times. According to research done by the Aberdeen Group, 25% of an agent’s time is spent idle. What is the best use of this time when an agent is not helping customers or being coached? There’s no denying that some idle time is essential for employees to ward off burn out and ironically, be capable of giving more; however, if idle time is too high, it may just be a waste of resources, not to mention money.
To begin to address how to better manage idle time, a contact center must address how to better manage staffing in general. Pay attention to the rhythms of your organization. What are peak times? When are more agents needed? What are the scheduling blocks which are overstaffed? Can you find the sweet spot between having enough agents to meet customer needs but not so many that there is not enough work to go around? Fortunately, there are some great workforce management tools on the market, such as KOVA’s Verint Media Recorder. Your company can also look into whether a callback system would be a good fit to streamline the interaction between agent response and customer satisfaction.
It may not be immediately obvious how, or rather when, idle time is accruing. A survey by Knowlagent reported that most idle time takes place in less than three minute parcels. If you’d like to reclaim this time, it will have to be through assignments that can be broken down and attended to in short bursts. These assignments can be varied, ranging from anything from dealing with traffic from other channels, such as email, to reviewing training material. Agents’ efforts can be redirected to reaching out to new customers or collecting feedback from old ones. If the latter is done methodically, through a survey, it has the possibility of gathering some incredibly insightful glimpses into customers’ experience. Another option is to use the idle time to run a quiz circuit within the center, in which agents test one another on company history and innovations. This can be made especially fun with small incentive prizes, like KitKat bars or gift certificates to local restaurants. The spirit of wholesome competition can also be captured by sharing an excellent phone call or troubleshooting session with the entire team so that it can collectively learn and grow.
If these tasks can be made attractive to agents or somehow bolster the contact center culture, so much the better. The activity you design for idle time does not even have to be directly related to the work being done. It can also be an opportunity to practice working towards a shared goal. Contact centers jobs are often highly sedentary and at the same time, can be hard on the neck and shoulders. If your contact center culture wants to have healthy living and wellness as values, then perhaps the short breaks can be used to engage some gentle stretching or mindful breathing. If company values are centered around gratitude and self-reflection, maybe some of the idle time is used to journal or write a note of appreciation to someone else in the center.
Whatever you decide to implement, don’t be afraid to garner feedback from your agents. You may find that they themselves are feeling bored or would prefer to have some other activity. Including them in the conversation not only opens the gates for some unexpected inspiration, it recruits their commitment to the center’s success.
Though technological innovations can often raise difficult ethical questions and exist in a grey area, there is little contention or hesitation over their place in advancing public safety. Whether it is an elderly person who can reach out with the press of a button for help after a fall or a new mom who can get access to the most up-to-date research on vaccines, technology can act as a guardian and a bridge in those moments when it is most urgent that we be able to communicate. The ambulance dispatch center is no exception. Though once, it was a sparse space with one employee, a telephone, and some pen and paper to record data; today, it is streamlined, efficient, and highly sophisticated. Emergency medical services are able to deliver life-saving processes like early CPR and rapid defibrillation because skillful dispatchers and their electronic sidekicks are able to connect people with the help they need faster than ever.
Ambulance dispatch centers are not just transmitters of what they hear anymore, but also often serve a preliminary diagnostic function that may include assessing the degree of threat. Here, with the support of state-of-the-art Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD), the emphasis is gradually shifting from passing the call from the first call center to dispatch as soon as possible to being able to produce a clear picture of the nature of the emergency as soon as possible. Though there is still a high premium on speed, there is a paradigm shift that prioritizes an informed and intelligent response over a merely prompt one.
In place to do so is the detailed and thorough Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS), which assists the Emergency Medical Dispatcher (EMD) to produce a preliminary assessment of the patient. It incorporates the patient’s demographics, like age, gender, and weight, with the reported symptoms to yield a comprehensive data-based action plan. It is designed in such a way that it takes into account the worst possible case so that it is low in risk and high in preparedness. Peer-reviewed studies have shown that the MPDS system is effective and reliable. After its introduction at the London Ambulance Service, a 200% increase was evidenced in the diagnosing of cardiac arrest over a period of three years; similarly, seizure and stroke are also able to be caught and treated sooner. Finally, it has also been proven that those cases which the MPDS system deemed low risk were accurately gauged 99% of the time.
These leaps in diagnostic technology can save precious time. They can put the necessary tools in the hands of non-Advanced Life Support Teams (ALS) to enable them to identify a life threatening situation, or to recognize that the caller may be better served by drawing on a less emergency geared resource.
The direction ambulance dispatch centers are moving in is sustained by a superabundance of data. Supervisors of dispatch centers that once might have strategized amidst maps on walls and heaps of paperwork now rely on CAD systems and savvy software applications. Further developments are focused on better integrating geographic information systems (GIS) applications into CAD software. In the past couple of years, GIS applications have grown to provide not only key cross streets or directions but vital bits of information like the location of fire hydrants, building blue prints, and unique features of the landscape. Incorporating GIS into CAD software will lend itself to a much more user friendly experience.
In addition to nuanced maps and diagnostic aids, ambulance dispatch centers not also have at their disposal – real time feedback, more organized records and notes, and better synced files between EMS, hospitals, and personal medical files.
A more resourced and connected dispatch center is key to emergency response. As the tools at hand become more nuanced and intuitive, it is important that we also be able to provide the training and upgrades to know what is possible and how to execute it in a way that helps save lives. The traditional concepts of the “chain of survival” and the “need for speed” are still valid; however, our ability to build on them is evolving.
Managing a contact center, or even working the phones, can be an art and a science. At its heart is cultivating good relationships with customers, but it can also be a process in which one has to learn how to juggle numbers, human needs, and technical intervention. Like any discipline, it requires continuing education and fine tuning. For the manager or agent who is interested in refining his or her own craft, the following are a few highly recommended books from experts in contact center operations and customer service.
Inspired to hit the library yet? It’s not just about doing your homework; reading up on industry standard, blazing new connections, and exploring theories of what works and doesn’t can help you be a better employee, a better boss, and a better team player.
