The Best Way to Design Your Call Center

Call center managers and planners have a much more difficult job today than in times past. With far more products and services being specially created, marketed, sold and supported than ever before, call centers struggle to deliver different service levels to different types of callers with different needs and issues. Today's phone switches provide great flexibility in determining how calls are routed and queued, but at the same time make planning and analysis even more difficult by making it possible to link multiple centers easily, prioritize certain calls, access agents with different skill sets and customize call routing logician addition, all center requirements such as call messaging, call transfer and agent conferencing all have an impact on service levels and budgets.

Today, quality assurance call centers constitute a more important part of more businesses than ever. In particular, sales and service call centers are often the key point of contact between a company and its customers, which makes it both expensive and mission-critical.

Companies that do not take the appropriate steps to design new call centers effectively -- or to manage, configure and leverage

call center systems properly-- quickly find that their planning mistakes translate into lower service levels, lost revenue, increased costs and extremely frustrated and dissatisfied customers. Call center managers must be able to understand what is going on in their call centers, to know how calls, routes, agents and other factors are service levels, abandonment rates and agent utilization. To rely on guesswork, -and-error, intuition or "black box" software is simply too dangerous for companies that want to succeed -- and too risky for call center managers who want to survive.

What is Simulation?

 

1.      What Questions Can Call Center Simulation Help You Answer

2.      Creating a Simulation Model of Your Call Center

3.      Why Simulation is the New Standard for Call Center Design and Analysis

4.      Back-Of-The Envelope Calculations

5.      Erlang Models

6.      The Advantages of Simulation?

7.      Conclusion

8.      What Questions Can Call Center Simulation Help You Answer?

 

Simulation is the most effective methodology for organizations designing new call centers or implementing changes to existing centers. With computer simulation, call center managers and analysts can quickly construct a model of an existing or proposed call center for the purpose of understanding its performance over time. This "virtual call center" incorporates all the system dynamics and intricacies of your call center's business, providing you with a "What If" laboratory for strategic planning. By running the simulation model on a PC with specific inputs, such as call forecasts, routing scripts and agent schedules, analysts can immediately identify critical information such as expected customer wait times, abandonment rates and staff utilization levels.

This information, displayed in easy-to-understand reports, tables and graphs, can facilitate design and planning decisions that ultimately affect customer satisfaction and the center's bottom line. In addition, most simulation software products include an animated graphical display of the model as it is running, enabling analysts to spot patterns and problems that might otherwise go undetected.

 

Simulation has been established as a mainstay in other parts of the corporate enterprise, including manufacturing, distribution and logistics. For example, manufacturing organizations in the automotive, defense and electronics industries have relied upon simulation to facilitate strategic decisions for many years. Companies like Ford, Motorola, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard and Intel have trained dozens of employees in the science of building simulation models of applications such as production lines, distribution channels and supply chains.

 

Only in the last few years, however, has simulation emerged an an invaluable technology for call center management because call centers have become are too complicated for traditional analysis methods to provide accurate or useful answers to key business questions. "The introduction of call center simulators gives management a tool that allows for trail of all new ideas in a laboratory setting. This capability takes the risk out of evolving call center technologies and allows managers to make informed decisions," said Martin Prunty, a leading call center consultant.

Without disrupting your call center's business or impacting your operating budget, simulation quickly and accurately enables you to understand how your call center operations will perform under certain scenarios, before any changes are actually made. Once you have built a simulation model of your call center (or of your entire call center network), you can conduct "experiments" that enable you to see the impact of different management decisions. In particular, once a base model has been constructed, many different questions about your call center can be answered:

 

·        How can skills=based routing best help our center and what is the payoff?

·        what if we added an IVR (interactive voice response) unit to handle some simple customer questions?

·        What if we considered adding an extra shift, increasing staffing levels or cross-training our agents?

·        What impact would outsourcing overflow calls have on our service levels and budget?

·        What if we started to give our "best" customers special services and/or queue treatment?

·        How should we handle different types of call escalation?

·        Can we improve service levels by employing "dispatchers" to gather basic customer information?

·        What are the implications of turning 25 percent to 50 percent of our agents into inbound-outbound "blend" representatives?

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Creating a Simulation Model of Your Call Center System

Why Simulation is the New Standard for Call Center Design and Analysis

Simulation allows you to explicitly spell out your call center design in terms of different routes into different queues with different priorities and getting from different types of agents with different skills. In particular, simulation enables you to model call center features such as those listed here:

Skill-based routing

Multiple call types

Simultaneous queuing

Customer abandonment patterns

Call routing and overflow

Messaging and call return

Priority queuing

Call transfer and agent conferencing

Agent preferences and proficiency

Agent schedules (including breaks, meetings, and lunches)

Blend agents (handling both inbound and outbound calls

These key call center design components will have a significant impact on the most important performance measures, such as customer waiting time, call abandonment rates and agent utilization. For example, giving certain types of calls priority over others will increase the service levels for the rest. Similarly, allowing calls to queue simultaneously for different agent groups will affect agent utilization for each of these groups while also having a major effect on service levels and abandonment rates. Simulation allows you to understand and evaluate these types of issues and tradeoffs.