Operations

Experienced, specially trained Operations Desk specialists staff this position on a rotating shift basis to act as our internal "call traffic controllers" 24 hours per day, seven days per week, to better ensure that our Business Support Associates are receiving your customers' calls without delay.

Just like an air traffic controller, our Operations Desk specialists monitor many functions that are essential to keeping our contact center running smoothly on schedule, 24/7/365:

• Service Level Monitoring

  Our goal is to answer 90% of calls live within 4 rings. The operations desk monitors real time, in addition to 30 minute summary reporting, and custom alerts for the Service Level (SL) goal.

• Inbound Call Traffic

  The Operations Desk oversees our real time inbound call traffic. They are trained to monitor this traffic for Average Speed to Answer (ASA), number of calls entered, number of calls abandoned, number of calls in queue, oldest call in queue, with a focus on answering quickly to exceed our SL goals.

• Average Speed to Answer

  For us--and for you--Average Speed to Answer, also known as ASAs are of the utmost importance. We want to answer live your inbound callers, and in order to succeed, we understand that we need to be quick to answer calls. Our Operations Desk focuses on ASA times, and if we're not answering our calls within SL goals, will take immediate action including staffing and management alerts to help maintain our ASA goals.

• No Juggling of Multiple Lines

  Our system ensures that calls are handled by one associate from start to finish. Without a chance of bog, interrupted by other inbound calls.

• Abandons

  In an effort to minimize our call abandons, our Operations Desk monitors any abandons to target low single digit percentages. If abandons exceed our SL targets, our scheduling and management team is immediately notified so that action can be taken to ensure we exceed our SL targets for each day and each 30 minute interval throughout the day.

• Agent Status

  Critical to answering the calls is real time insight into the status of each agent. Questions like: Who is logged in? Who is on a call? Who is available to take calls? What is the average time between calls? Is our percentage of agents waiting sufficient to take historical call volumes? These and more questions are asked when looking at real time agent state.

• Call Times

  While it's important to answer your customers' calls in a timely manner, it's equally important that each agent work efficiently on your behalf, which means that we want to serve your customers as quickly and as accurately as possible in order to keep your costs down. Our internal reporting also looks at call times and overall customer time and associates with unusually long average handle times are coached on skills to improve their efficiency in the call handling process.

In addition to managing these crucial statistics, the 24-Hour Operations Desk also works to maintain accuracy in our staffing, communicating with our scheduling team and managers to help ensure shifts are appropriately staffed for our Service Level goals. To aid in this process, those working the Operations Desk monitor multiple screens on real time displays as well as completing comprehensive reports every 30 minutes for proactive staffing and scheduling alerts. These 30 Minute Interval Snapshot Reports give an overall picture of call traffic highlighting inbound calls, average speed to answer, abandons, queues, and call performance over the previous 30 minutes. These reports and custom alerts for unusual or unpredicted spikes are used to gauge any immediate adjustments in staffing.

We also understand the real gravity of working efficiently, and our Operations Desk periodically--and frequently--works to assure quality through running test calls, helping to ensure quick answer times, correct telephone etiquette, and an enthusiastic tone of voice. This periodic testing is done in addition to our standard Quality Assurance processes performed on a daily and weekly basis.

Here at AnswerConnect, we work to be a productive and proficient force for handling your calls. We know that your customers are important and should be treated well. That's why our 24-Hour Operations Desk works hard to maximize our resources, every hour, every day.