Daniel Ord is the Founder of OmniTouch International, and one of the global Contact Centre industry’s most influential figures.
With over 30 years of experience under his belt, Daniel is bringing his expertise to a wider audience with a new Masterclass on High Performance Management for Inbound Contact Centres. The two-day Masterclass will take place in Manchester in July, and in London in October.
The more complex the Contact Centre ecosystem becomes – with multiple channels of communication, omnichannel ambitions, and increasing customer expectations – the more the fundamentals matter.
This is because once you have mastered Contact Centre operations, you will have a solid framework on which to ‘hang’ your decisions – whether that’s people, technology, or Customer Experience.
A Contact Centre expert would be expected to accurately answer the 15 Contact Centre operations questions presented in this article.
This should be without any reference, discussion with others, or looking up the answers.
It’s not that the questions are easy – they’re not! It’s that to be a master of the environment requires very particular know-how, and once your Contact Centre folks have this level of know-how, performance will improve – guaranteed!
So give these 15 questions a go. For each question select either A, B, C, or D, and there is one correct answer for each one
To find out your results, simply email your answers to daniel.ord@omnitouchinternational.com, with the question number and the answer you selected.
It should look like this:
1. A
2. B
3. A
4. C
Etc.
Good luck!
1. Which of the following contact types require the use of service level to determine staff requirements
I: Outbound calls
II: Email (with 24-hour response time)
III: Live chat/Text chat
IV: Walk-ins
A. I only
B. I and IV only
C. II and III only
D. III and IV only
2. Which of the following is the industry standard service level?
A. 80% answered in 20 seconds
B. 90% answered in 30 seconds
C. Industry standards only exist for vertical industries (e.g. financial services, telecommunications, insurance, etc.)
D. There is no industry standard
3. A Call Centre has recently established KPI targets. The Service Level objective is 80% answered in 20 seconds and the Average Speed of Answer (ASA) objective is 10 seconds. The Call Center also plays a prerecorded announcement for all callers prior to queuing. Given this information, which of the following statements is true?
A. The Call Centre is measuring typical callers’ experience more effectively than call centres that measure service level alone
B. Setting both Service Level and ASA targets is not appropriate
C. To be most meaningful, ASA should be measured as an end-of-day average
D. The timing of ASA should begin as soon as the prerecorded announcement starts
4. Given the following information, what is the abandonment rate for the week (Monday – Friday)? Total calls answered for the week: 9479. Total calls abandoned for the week: 702. Monday’s abandonment: 10.4%. Tuesday’s abandonment: 7.4%. Wednesday’s abandonment: 5.4%. Thursday’s abandonment: 3.4%. Friday’s abandonment: 7.0%
A. 6.7%
B. 6.9%
C. 7.2%
D. 33.6%
5. When managing the queue in real-time, which of the following real-time statistics should you look at first?
A. Agent status
B. Longest current wait
C. Number of calls in queue
D. Average time to abandonment
6. Which of the following statements is TRUE?
I. Occupancy is the percentage of time agents spend talking to customers or completing after-call work
II. Occupancy is a result of random call arrival
III. When service level increases, occupancy increases
IV. When Occupancy is very high for extended periods of time, agents tend to work harder to clear out the queue
A. II only
B. I and II only
C. II and IV only
D. I, III, and IV only
7. If an Agent arrives 30 minutes late to work on calls or live chats, which of the following actions would benefit the Contact Centre the most (assume the Agent is unable to consult with his/her Team Leader on the most appropriate action)?
A. Stay 30 minutes extra at the end of his/her shift
B. Skip his/her morning and afternoon breaks, each of which is 15 minutes
C. Come back from his/her hour lunch break 30 minutes early.
D. Take his/her breaks and lunch as normal and leave at his/her scheduled time
8. Which one of the following statements is FALSE?
A. Measuring the number of calls handled by an Agent is a good productivity standard
B. Adherence to schedule is the single most important productivity measure for a Contact Centre Agent handling Service Level-based contacts
C. When adherence to schedule improves, Service Level improves as well
D. Most of what drives the Average Handling Time lies outside the control of the Agent
9. Which statement is the MOST important?
A. To achieve productivity objectives, Agents will need to sacrifice a bit on quality
B. Average Handling Time is the most important productivity standard for an Agent
C. All Contact Centres use internal monitoring to calculate their quality scores for Agents.
D. It is possible to design standards that enable Agents to achieve both quality and productivity objectives
10. The best definition of Time Series forecasting is:
A. A method where the past is a good basis for predicting the future
B. A method which is only used in rare circumstances
C. A method that covers the qualitative side of forecasting
D. A method that doesn’t require judgement
11. What variables does Erlang C require to perform staffing calculations?
I. Average handling time
II. Call volume
III. Number of abandoned calls
IV. Service level objective in seconds
A. I and II only
B. I, II and III only
C. I, II and IV only
D. II, III and IV only
12. Your Call Centre supports email and is expecting 200 email messages to arrive between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. The average handling time of email messages is 8 minutes. Your promised response time is 4 hours.
Assuming the Agents can work uninterrupted on these email messages only, which of the following staffing scenarios would meet your response time objective for these email messages?
I. 4 Agents working from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
II. 9 Agents working from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
III. 14 Agents working from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
IV. 40 Agents who each spend at least an hour working on email from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
A. II only
B. III and IV only
C. II, III and IV only
D. I, II, III, and IV
13. Which of the following are factors you need to incorporate in a monthly labor budget?
I. Is my Agent in the building?
II. What is the monthly average Occupancy rate?
III. Is my Agent on a break?
IV. Is my Agent on leave?
A. III only
B. I and II only
C. I, II and III only
D. I, II, III and IV
14. Which of the following KPI results can be determined by looking at only ACD reports?
I. Service Level
II. Average Speed of Answer
III. Abandoned Calls
IV. Adherence to Schedule Percent
A. I and II only
B. III and IV only
C. I, II and III only
D. I, II, III, and IV
15. When forecasting call volume, you should use:
A. Calls answered
B. Calls answered plus calls abandoned
C. Calls offered discounted for multiple attempts from individual callers
D. All calls offered