1. Understand Your Metrics: Anywhere 365 (A365) provides 21 out of the box reports for an organization to help improve overall customer experience rather than having to add additional resources such as agents or higher caller capacity for those peak or special events that only happen during a few days out of the year.

2. Managing Call Volume – Be aware of the impact of your communication with customers on call volume. Are your communications prompting sudden, high volume of calls? Consider spacing out your communications to manage the volume of replies.
3. Empower Customers – When communicating with customer, provide alternative solutions that empower customers to find answers or solve problems without calling for support. Self-service website tools, chat, text messaging. Automating the most commonly asked questions and where to go to solve them.
4. Effectively Managing Your Queues: Do you know your peak times during the year? If so, you can use the Erlang Calculator listed below to predict staffing needs. You can look up historical data and use the above mentioned reports to prepare for coverage during peak times.
5. Call Center Staffing: Tools such as Erlang Calculator can be used to calculate call center staffing needs.
6. Agent Skills: The recommended report is the Skills Report, this addresses two overall measurements, the UCC overall performance and the agents performance for the same period. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) shows the percentage of calls answered within 20 seconds divided by the total number of accepted and missed calls. The number calls transferred by the UCC and by which agent, gives a comparison narrative that may need to be looked in further.
7. Optimize the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Design: Set max number of callers in queues, the voice message for all the queue options as well as the max call queue message to let callers know to call back later.
8. Improve Call Handling Processes: Set your target average response time, if it is not meeting 90% SLA, provide callers with helpful information with queue messages for that day’s events.
9. Schedule Workforce: To be available to jump in if there is a spike in calls (mock testing should be conducted before peak times as the calls are gradually increasing events before the actual peak time).
10. Maximize Business Impact: Action items such as knowing the type of demand for calls, leveraging prompts, messages to instruct customers to quickly get to the information needed without having to talk to an agent is the most efficient use of the call center application.
11. Workflow: Document your call work flow. The following Dialogue Routing report shows a visual representation of calls for the period selected.
12. Pre-record: Pre-recording audio files for high call volumes, changes in business hours, emergencies, and holidays, important deadlines, most frequently asked questions and after hours, for the start of the new academic calendar year. Within few minutes, the callers can hear up to date information and receive instructions to lookup information or get their questions answered.

Note: Should you need additional support or questions contact Unified Communications by submitting a UIT Work Order Request. Please select the Service/Work Order option, after you login to the portal.

* Telecom Analyst rates apply for move, adds and changes to your Unified Call Center (UCC) $150 per hour – Please view the latest Product Guide for pricing information.