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“Special Agents” in the Contact Center
Flying to San Francisco yesterday for the Genesys Telecom Labs’ Analyst Conference I was reading background information on companies nominated to Genesys' Customer Innovation Awards. One common thread was their use of dynamic skills-based routing. This made me consider whether most contact center executives consider skills-based routing as the best option, or do some prefer to have all their agents trained to handle any and every call type.
During the welcome reception I asked this question of Genesys COO Paul Segre. He explained that one long-standing call center myth is the benefit of having generalists. In a small contact center, this approach may prove efficient. But in larger centers, especially those that handle complex inquiries, having specialists is usually the best approach, he said. According to Segre, these specialists can be either subject matter experts, for example, or service delivery experts—those who are best at handling key accounts.
Segre cited a study that showed that the level of productivity of one contact center actually decreased when specialists in two areas were cross-trained in the other area. Agents continued to excel in their primary area of expertise, but their efficiency waned when handling the other call type.
One exception may be agents who handle multiple channels. Although some agents may excel via phone versus via online chat or email, most can be trained to perform at a high level across channels. Segre suggested that the best approach here is to assign agents blocks of time for each channel, for example, having an agent take calls for two hours, then handle online chat sessions for the next two hours, etc.
What approach do you take in your contact center?
Interesting "Special Agent" senerio. Although I am not sure this would be the most efficient way to utilize a singular entity. The way I prefer to use singular entities is to change routing prefernces and utilize engineering work-arounds. A separate agent group to utilize cross-specialized agents seems to be the context described above. that way cross-trained personell can be easily added and removed as personell progress or change job descriptions. Swet-shop senerios obviously come under different scrutiny as far as strategic distributions and social engineered motivators but where government and or specialized training personell are concerned there are legal as well as moral considerations that preclude singular entity call distribution destinations. It is also important to understand the context to this reply that in our current version the data tags do not support the data topology where a name to agent ID creates and archives a separate data track for reporting. I asked for this back in revision 5 and anticipate revision 7. As of yet this request has not come to fruit as far as I am aware. If this is changed that would allow a single entity to provide better statistical gathering and make the special agent a prospective target for cross-trained personell but still inefficient as compared to a separte agent group with queue markers to show shared distribution calls. If I misunderstood the premise of the original post I apoligize and respectfully retract.
Great post, Ginger. It was a moment of synchonicity when I read it - since a client had just talked to me that morning about moving to more specialized teams in their operation. Thanks for spurring my thinking even further!