CHANNEL BEYOND Information Co., Ltd

There are generally three situations in which the call peak of the customer service center occurs:

① Natural peak fluctuations in the morning and afternoon every day ② Regular peaks at the beginning of the month or the end of the month or other time points caused by the business cycle ③ Irregular sudden peaks.

The first situation can be basically dealt with through the combination of shift type design and shift. However, the effectiveness of the response depends on the level of scheduling, available resources, and the principle of trade-offs in the interests of all parties.

In the second case, the first is to try to push other business departments to extend the cycle of the things that they have done in a short period of time, so that the peaks and valleys of the traffic can be extended and smoothed. The second is to take measures such as performance lever incentives to voluntarily work overtime, stop taking shifts, self-service channel guidance, online channel guidance, intelligent system front-end, inter-team support, and investigation and elimination of the root cause of incoming calls to deal with it.

The third situation is the most difficult to deal with.

There was no pattern, no warning, and the peak of contact came silently and instantly. In this case, we can only take the approach of planning in advance, responding during the event, and summarizing after the event.

Pre-planning means that the customer service center should have its own emergency contact plan. The plan should include the judgment criteria, severity level, response level, schedulable resources, scheduling authority and other main contents, and should be continuously adjusted and optimized in practice. It is necessary to be cautious in the setting of the judgment criteria. How much time period exceeds the normal number of calls can be judged as a sudden peak, how to set the judgment criteria for each response level, and what should be done first after the contact peak is found , how long the contact peak lasts to start the emergency plan, etc., all require rich practical experience in operation management.
In-process response is emergency execution. Adjustable resources are allocated in place according to the plan, and the trend of contact volume is continuously observed, and the response method can be adjusted at any time.
The post-event review is mainly to conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis and summary of the sudden peak, including what caused it, whether it will occur in the future, what are the conditions of the occurrence, can it be coordinated and improved, how did we deal with it, whether there are any problems, and what is the problem? Which link should be adjusted in future similar events, etc.

Strategies for Coping with Traffic Peak in Customer Service Center