Thanks to all those who offered prayers for me and my work in the startup of the contact center I've been working on.
As anticipated, we had some initial glitches in the first hour. The very minor ones involved agents forgetting the proper logon procedures, and we had our first three calls abandon from cycling through redirect-on-no-answer purgatory. But a simple one-on-one coaching cured that, and the rest of the day went, well, pretty swimmingly. The other glitch involved a procedural issue in which there was no ticket started to install and implement the call reporting software necessary for the contact center management on my PC. Whoopsie. But it's amazing what the words "mission critical" can do to elicit the correct response, and within less than two hours all software was installed and working.
Other than those two issues, we did have some staffing issues. I have eight full-time agents. One went on maternity leave last month--which we knew about prior to offering the position. I also approved another agent's vacation for today--long before I knew today was our "go live" day. Then two other agents were out sick, leaving me with half a staff. Yikes. Thankfully, our call volume was, as we wanted it to be, quite minimal.
That said, I was mildly surprised that we did have the call volume we had. I say that because due to the fluctuating nature of our "go live" date, our marketing campaign has been pretty much nonexistent. But word got out. We had quite geographically dispersed calls (from Louisiana, Texas, Colorado, Canada, and California).
We definitely have some efficiency issues to look into (RONAs, abandons, average talk time, after call work time, etc.). But as this was the first day, I'm not worried about it. Indeed, I've pretty much left this first week to sort itself out. I'll call attention to these issues each day and then follow through on one-on-one coaching starting next week.
And our email volume was slightly above average. Which made for a nice steady work flow day, but nothing overwhelming for the agents. Tomorrow I expect to have at least two more agents back, and hopefully the volume will rise tomorrow as well, as our historicals are already establishing.
Today was, in summary, a very gratifying day. No systemic failures, plenty of first-day mixups, and yet some good solid foundations laid. I'm really quite pleased.
Thanks be to God who is concerned about every aspect of our lives. Even contact centers.
Posted by Clifton at October 2, 2006 06:57 PM | TrackBack