I am managing a very small and a new call center of just 7 agents handling real estate business processes. My biggest problem is inspite of brainstorming for over last 3 months I still couldn't find the root cause as to WHY I AM STILL NOT ABLE TO REDUCE MY LOST CALLS RATIO?
I did everything right from changing the script to incoming calls routing, but all in vain

Office Hours: 8 hours
Agents: 6
Avg Wait Ans : 4 secs
AHT : 0:01:47
No of Calls : 291 calls
Lost Calls ; 31
Lost Calls (percent) : 11 (tooooooo high..im lost why??)

Pls ask me if any details or stats you want...pls help.

Ignore opening hours for a start.

What's your average time to abandon?

How long does it take to connect to an agent (ie: RING
on the turret, I'm assuming you're timing from that point)

It may be you CAN'T actually answer the calls as
they're terminating BEFORE they could be answered.

It could be <2sec for the ABA speed

4 sec sounds like 1/2 a ring to me after handoff, so
it may not even be making the turret even though the swich / CCM
thinks it's been handed off.

Seen this once before.

If it is it's a customer impatience thing and there's NOTHING you can do!

An ASA of 4 sec is VERY VERY good! Especially given at least 1/2 will be
<4sec.

HTH

DaveA

Thanx Dave!

I'm at present jotting down a list of all check points to find the cause of it. Callcenter operations is so scientific that sometimes a small problem leads to a bigger and nastier impact.

hahaha...and sure i have added all your points including 'If it's a customer impatience thing then there's NOTHING you can do! ' I like that. I wish my BOSS likes it too when I say that.

To ans your question, this is the last 5 days stats
Avg Wait Lost : 0:00:09/0:00:20/0:00:34/0:00:03/0:00:06

And on the 4th ring it gets connected to my agents

I think I am doing a terrific job and my lost calls isn't high enough, but there is something which i'm missing out. Reports always shows high. To be honest, I'm kinda shameful about the fact that I'm cheating at the moment by taking out reports with a min abandoned time of 25 secs.

Btw howz AVAYA? We have taken AVAYA services. I have a feeling they arent that best in providing services, atleast in Dubai. I dunno about INDIA and the rest of the world.

Your comment "An ASA of 4 sec is VERY VERY good! Especially given at least 1/2 will be <4sec. "

This is not a given, at least mathematically anyway.

Hi Indro

I agree with dave, this is either customer driven (in which case you have a very impatient customer) or something in the technology that limits the call handling capacity of the office.

With six agents across the day you should have more than enough resource to handle the calls unless

- The technology is limiting your capacity to handle calls - e.g. you have people in availablle and a call can't get through to them
- the agents are limiting your capacity - e.g. they are logged onto the phones but are in a "not ready" state
- the customers are abandoning really quickly or you have a large number of calls that abandon at very specific times of the day that skew the overall figures

I'd try ringing the centre, as a customer, when you can see that agents are available to handle a call and see what happens. Also ring when they are all busy, see if you can ascertain why customers abandon so quickly.

Eamon

Ok,

Point taken, but....

Gross overall stats wise when
talking about that short an interval
the curve will Tend toward a Poisson
bell curve.

If it was around the ABA stats I'd
think it is low end outliers bringing it down.

However, in this case being ASA, I think it's actually
that short.

HTH

DaveA

Hi

Please check when are the maximum calls being abandoned, in which half hourly slot.

please check for your average wait time half hourly.

might be on a day level you have a 4 sec wait time. but in 1/2 hourly it will vary, atleast you will be able to find the reason why its happening.might be a solution as well.

Good to be back frm a 10 day vacation although I miss the lovely days I spent with my fiancee..ahem!..anyways....

Its really interesting and challenging...do you know that after analysing 5 reports I could find out that most of the calls were still getting lost inspite of all my agents were free during that time? I matched the time when the call arrived and lost with the time when the agents were in ready state. All were in ready state and the call still got lost. Abandoned time is 1:34 secs which means cm wasn't impatient atall. Our welcome greeting is 20 secs because it has to be both in english and arabic..

When I started off I was losing 17% of the calls. Now I could reduce it to 11% because I did a spill over of calls between English and Arabic. I have 6 agents who can speak in Eng out of which 3 can speak in arabic too. So when an eng call comes in all my agents are ready to take, while in arabic I am restricted to only 3. Intially I thought I was losing calls in Arabic, so I did a spill over of calls on a preferential basis. All arabic calls would hit the arabic speakers, if busy, will go to english speakers, who then can ask the cm if they can speak in english. If not transfer the calls to an arabic speaker the moment he is free. I wouldn't worry about AHT coz as per SLA I am way down and customer's satisfaction is not a big deal coz handle time of each calls is usually 1-2 mins plus cm is more than interested to talk coz its millions of profit they make thru us. I know some of you would be thinking its not professional to spill arabic calls to english, but Im helpless coz I cannot ask to increase my staff capacity as there is no justification. You take any calculation, the answer would be "you have the right capacity for the number of calls you are receiving".

Another thing which I did was going through the IVR carefully. There i found some flaws. In some options I found that the the calls get dead after the message, e.g one of the option says 'press 1 for new projects, 2 for brokerage, 3 for lease and 4 for others'. well once it says that, the message doesnt repeat and the call is cancelled. Most of us while going thru the IVR are in absent state of mind for few secs coz most of us call up toll free numbers while doing some other work. Messages on the IVR should always repeat twice or thrice for the customer to understand and get his attention or register in his mind for his next action. This solution helped me...........but cant believe the problem when all my agents are free, how can a call get dropped even after waiting for 1:34 secs

I called the AVAYA guys coz they messed it up. They will do the analysis (free of cost ofcourse) and come up with the soulution. Hope this work..cheers!