To enable your call centre to achieve maximum efficiency, the deployment of Work Activity Modes (WAMs) is essential.

If you come across a poor performing call centre or one not maximising it's capacity, you can bet there will be a lot of unaccounted time.  This can be translated as:

The poor perfromance here is easily recognisable - high levels of Not-Ready (not being available for calls) - staff have low Ready (Talk and Available time).  Occupancy is high but is likely to have more than the desired levels of Wrap.  Of course, some poor performing centres will be the result of under-resourcing.

Much of the inefficiency of the poorer performing centres is brought about through a number of reasons

• Not knowing what staff are doing
• Staff not being aware of what is expected of them
• Not adopting Work Activity Modes behaviours and measurement
• Systems not being able to deploy or report Work Activity Modes.
• Not maximising Ready (Talk + Available)
• Not minimising Not-Ready (Wrap + Breaks)

If any of the above is reflective of the poor performance then the only measures for advisors will be calls answered.

In some call centres Not-Ready time can be as high as 50%+.  One particular centre where high Not-Ready was prevalent, staff wrap up calls in a Not-Ready function and also take breaks and undertake other adhoc activity in this function.  This also allows staff to take 'unscheduled' breaks in Not-Ready, without too much concern over detection.

Some times, as in the above example, systems do not always support the deployment of Work Activity Modes, but there are always ways to ensure staff adhere to WAMs and use the systems to it's fullest.  In the above example the following sequence occurs:

The Work Activity Modes become cloudy - Wrap and Break time start to become merged in a disproportionataly high Not-Ready.  We need staff in separate defined Work Modes - as a result the sequence is redefined to the one below - this is not ideal due to the simple ACD functionality but we do produce single Work Modes for measurement and targeting.

We are now able to target and measure Work Activity Modes - advisors should only be logged-on for these activities and should be logged off for others.

Some ACDs go the other way and provide a plethora of Work Activity Modes, these are also known as Walkaway Codes - meaning when we walk away from our desk we log our activity - training, meeting, lunch etc.  As such the advisor remains logged on for their entire schedule - this rarely works well or accurately, with staff playing off one code against another or forgetting to log the appropriate code.  This is not recommended to be good practice.