Hi

We are restructuring our ACD platform and the call scripts within it. One of the options that the design team have given us is the use of "ACD Mail".

Has anyone used this before:

Was it of beneift?
Did it cause backlogs for return calls?
How did users recieve it?

Any help / comments would be great

thanks Becky

Do you mean voicemail? If so is it agent specific, group specific, or route to first available agent in a group?

Here we go again!
When oh when will IT people and sales people actually talk to each other and come up with one name for one product.
How many times have topics become confused because serivces and products seem to have an endless array of names!!
There I've said it and I feel much better now.

Our ACD vendor, Aspect, has changed the names of all their products at least 3 times in 3 years! It makes it hard to have a clear conversation even if we both know the same product!

Hi Marrianne

It is the voicemail option, and would probly be queue specific.

My worry is that we may generate large volumes of call backs and not be able to meet the demand.

Becky

Good enough system. You have to ensure that you have sufficient people to return calls otherwise you will jeopardise customer service, which you obviously aware of.

Your call forecasting system should help you establish peaks and troughs, and you should then be able to identify windows at which time call backs can be made.

What types of workflow/ force, or CRM packages do people have experience of.

We are currently looking at Appropos and maybe Genesys.

Any advice on others??

I would recommend not offering voicemail immediately to callers. Give your agents a chance to pick up first, because callbacks can be a hairy situation. I usually offer voicemail to callers only after 60 seconds.

We have found that the voicemail queuing to groups of agents is difficult to control and manage. It was too easy for a call to be discarded and not called. The only time we use this is with a senior team of agents. Otherwise we put all of the messages into a specific voicemail box and have someone assigned to check that box each hour. That person often is also in charge of returning calls.

The CRM we have Siebel with is very nice but a bit pricey. Workflow we have an inhouse built package that works well.

Regards,
Marianne

You might want to take a look at this site

www.netcall.com/solutions/queuebuster.asp

Queuebuster is a nice bit of kit that you can programme in to take messages whilst you are busy and when agents come available the system will allocate callbacks to soak up the capacity.

Julian

thanks for the lead, have had a look and will definatly investigate it and present to management.

I believe that Thames Water currently use Queue buster to good effect. I would strongly advise against relying on the voicemail system unless it is to cover short peaks in calls only.

Recent experience of using voicemail as a back-up to not having enough agents taking calls has shown that the effects are generally bad. It makes future forecasting very difficult as calls offered are no longer reliable. In order to return the call you must remove agents from inbound call handling, this leads to more calls routing to voicemail, which leads to more people mkaing call backs etc. It can also lead you into a false sense of security, no need to recruit as we can simply use the voicemail system.

If you intend on using then produce a clear plan of when it will be used on how. Ensure you know when the peaks are, for how long and what resource would be required to complete the call backs and when you could use that resource. Ensure that your forecasts for call volumes take any effects of using the voicemail into account.

Having never used it I can't comment directly on Queue buster, but it does seem a mroe customer friendly way of dealing with the situation of queues. But remember that nothing beats having enough agents.