Shared Agents Only – Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
This post was authored by Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
It’s not uncommon for direct marketers to use shared agents. In discussions with customers and prospects, however, I have been surprised by the number of direct marketers that rely on shared agents exclusively. Although the scalability and cost effectiveness of shared agents can appear compelling, direct marketers who do this ignore the fact that it is nearly impossible for a shared agent who is taking calls for other clients to be wholly proficient on every client’s products. The implicit trade-off is cost for performance. Recognizing this fact, many contact center outsourcers allow customers to staff dedicated agents and give them the ability to overflow to their shared pool. The key drawback of this approach is that it requires the direct marketer to send all of its calls to one outsourcer, limiting choice in vendors and the flexibility of using multiple outsourcers.
Transera best practices strongly recommends that direct marketers employ a strategy that uses dedicated agents as well as multiple outsourcers. This approach provides the best of both worlds: the benefits of staffing agents with high degrees of knowledge and proficiency in the marketer’s products while also providing the choice, flexibility, and price competition inherent in multi-vendor environments. In this model, direct marketers can choose to locate both dedicated agents and shared agent pools across multiple vendors.
Transera’s Scorecard Routing solution takes the advantages of this model up to another level by finding the best available resource across the entire environment regardless of agent type or vendor. The key advantage of this approach is that direct marketers can staff highly trained, dedicated agents for expected call volumes while preserving the ability to burst to the best performing shared agent pools for unexpected call spikes. A common approach of Transera customers is to staff dedicated pools of agents at 80% of expected call volumes and to send the remaining volume to the best-performing shared agent pools. This ensures that dedicated agents are fully utilized, while also continually “exercising” shared agent resources. Greater use of highly proficient dedicated agents, coupled with intelligent real-time call allocation to the best-performing shared agent resources, increases both conversion rates and order values.