This isn’t so much a technical issue, but I’m trying to address it in a technical way if I can. Basically, we have an issue with:
-Too few agents available on some days
-Agents are busy and hit DND and forget about it
-We suspect we are missing customer calls because everyone is on DND for periods throughout the day
Obviously, new policy and management is the first solution. But I have some technical ideas/questions I wanted to ask your thoughts on:
Is there a way to tell how many calls go into our queues and drop out unanswered?
Is it possible to control DND status any other way than manually on the phone? Like a schedule, so that agents are forced out of DND while they’re here?
Is there a way to track DND stats for each agent to see who the biggest culprits are?
Any other ideas? Thinking of disabling DND and just putting our ring patterns on ringall temporarily to force people to pick up.
Since you can do this with SCCP phone, I’m sure there’s a way to do this with SIP phones:
In Chan-SCCP-B (a special channel driver to Cisco Phones), we manage the phone’s programmable key maps. The four little buttons along the bottom of the screen are programmable, and in SCCP mode we can add or delete certain buttons. Do Not Disturb, for example, is one of the things many of my customer request.
The same phone, in SIP mode, has a hardware controlled button set that can’t be changed, so for these installations, we need to use the bigger gun.
You can also disable the feature code for DND in the Feature Code Management page (Under “Admin” IIRC). Look for the DND Feature Code in there and disable it throughout the PBX.
I’ve been thinking of doing this, disabling DND, then trimming our time conditions to specifically match when people are in (rather than relying on DND). Put our queues on ringall, and then when the phone rings and you’re there, you take it. If it keeps ringing, it’s going to drive everyone nuts to the point that somebody will be forced to answer.
A little aggressive maybe, but it would eliminate the literal problem of everyone being on DND with customers sitting in the queue.
If you’re using queues, why not have your people log in and out? That will stop the phones from ringing and will drop your reporting requirements. The amount of time each person was on the phone will be tracked by their log in and log out times.
To be honest, there’s no good reason why anyone in a call center should be using DND. It’s not a call center option - it’s a management function.