Many of us use the Call Handling VCC but do you use all the bells and whistles on it?
At our helpline we were really sinking under the increased demand caused by really good publicity which increased demand instantly by 48%, and which then did not level off. Six months later we were still running at 42% higher demand than before the publicity took off. We still have only the same number of seats, and helpline workers were getting demoralised with our strike rate being so poor, and with the complaining from callers about the trouble they were having getting through.
After some thought and worry, fretting about what might be the outcome, we decided, as we had no more resources, to try to use our resources more intelligently. We thought to use the priority settings that you can give to the mapping of helpline workers to different channels more pronounced weighting. We thought that if we put workers into smaller teams and concentrated them on the individual channels of each phone line if we broke them down into calls from landlines, calls from withheld numbers and calls from mobiles. Currently we just had one line for each number and everyone was priority one…..
With the three teams decided, to match the different origins of the lines we set about dividing the workers up, and yes, we admit, we did take into account putting some workers in teams where we knew there were callers in progress who they worked particularly well. The point of the exercise was to improve service so there was no point to be cussed about that. We also did a lot of painful maths to work out the loading for each line. Withheld numbers are the highest number of calls so they have three times as many workers allocated to them as do landline calls which are really very few. We did play a little safe and made sure there were back up workers to the priority 1 workers in each group putting some priority 1 workers from another group as priority 2 workers elsewhere. The overall effect was to prioritise different workers as priority 1 workers for each type of call, to have more priority 1 workers for the busiest lines and to have some backup of workers on lower priority there to mop up the queue.
And the results? Maybe not spectacular numbers wise – though still significant, we have inproved our strike rate by 10% but more important, because there are fewer workers talking with each individual caller because of the smaller team the caller will get though to, calls are quicker as the story does not need to be repeated, repeat calls are reduced because more work and follow though happens sooner, any one becoming persistent during the night are more quickly picked up on and managed collectively. New callers too, are recognised more quickly and workers are aware of them sooner. All good, workers are feeling better as they feel more involved and in control, callers are happier because they dont have to repeat to unfamiliar workers.
We are aware of the risks of dependency, especially with the sort of calls we take, so we are planning to revolve the mapping on a quarterly basis, we dont think this will take us back to square one, as workers will have some knowledge of all current callers on all lines through the regular staff briefings.