It’s no secret that the call center is on the move. Increasingly, call centers are distributed operations with components located all over the country or even the world. Call center supervisors and managers have more demands on them today as well, and many of them simply can’t be at their desks all the time. So how do you manage a mobile call center?
On a mobile device, of course.
At the recent Interactions 2013 event held in Indianapolis, ContactCenterSolutions senior editor Peter Bernstein took a moment to speak with Tim Passios, Interactive Intelligence’s senior director of solutions marketing, about Interaction Supervisor, the company’s desktop contact center management application – part of its flagship Customer Interaction Center (CIC) software suite -- which was recently enhanced with a version that runs on the Apple iPad with versions for other popular tablets on the way. T
he new version, called Interaction Supervisor iPad Edition, is an application that runs on an iPad or iPad mini giving contact center supervisors, managers and executives insight and alerts to identify performance issues and initiate changes anytime, anywhere.
“Contact center supervisors are becoming a lot more mobile these days,” said Passios. “Traditionally, in the contact center, supervisors have always been tied to a desk. Whenever agents need assistance, the alert that would go to the supervisor’s desktop would require them to actually be at that desktop to be able to see that alert.”
Since supervisors often can’t be at their desks – they do, after all, have a team of agents to keep watch over, as well as meetings to attend – it becomes difficult for agents to seek guidance. In many cases, agents who need assistance are stuck standing and waving their arms around in the hope of attracting a supervisor to help them solve their problem.
“Supervisors want to be up and around in the contact center helping out, or they could be in meetings, they could be working from home or they could be traveling. The same is true for contact center managers and CEOs or CFOs…whoever needs to see the data of the contact center,” said Passios. “We needed a way to give statistical information and insights into what’s going on in the contact center to people who needed to see it when they need to see it.”
The application’s Supervisor Dashboard offers a statistical overview of what’s happening in the call center, allowing managers and supervisors to be able to track key performance indicators (KPI) to determine the health of the center’s operations in a glance at their tablets at any given moment and from wherever they happen to be. Supervisors can customize their dashboard views, and drill deeper into data to uncover more intelligence.
Customized alerts let supervisors know when they are needed on the call center floor in real-time, indicating the problem in advance so they are prepared to help an agent in trouble.
Supervisors can also easily create screen captures of elements on the dashboard and e-mail those captures to anyone who needs to see it. They can also access a physical map of the contact center and find each agent’s location, checking (or even changing) their status and drilling down to determine those agents’ skill sets.
To see the full interview with Tim Passios, find it here on ContactCenterSolutions.