Virtual Hold points out Lucyphone’s impact on call center operations

In my last post, I quoted from a post written by Virtual Hold’s Eric Camulli talking about Lucyphone. It was titled “I applaud the concept, but Lucyphone could be hurting more than helping”.

Both companies offer virtual queuing, which is the idea that the company will call you back when an agent is ready, rather than asking you to wait on hold.

One idea, three approaches

Virtual Hold represents the traditional approach — installing hardware and software at the call center. Lucyphone represents a disruptive new approach — based in the cloud and “unilateral” (i.e. not requiring any cooperation from the company). My company, Fonolo, also offers virtual queuing, using an approach that is a hybrid of the two.

The first point in Eric’s post concerned security, and my previous post added some thoughts on that. Here’s his second point:

Messing with agent performance metrics

To an agent, this [call-back] process is falsely accruing as ‘talk time’ — a metric by which many agents are measured to ensure high performance. So, is it possible that Lucy is skewing agent stats and affecting agent performance bonus? Yes, it’s possible…and not fair to them, either. … It’s possible that by skewing this data, Lucy may result in poorer customer service in the long run.

This is a concern we have also encountered in talking to companies about Fonolo’s virtual queuing service, Hold-for-Me. The only solution here is to work through these issues with the company, specifically the call center managers. The internal metrics used at the call center might have to be adjusted, depending on how they are set up.

There are also issues around workflow: How long does an agent wait during the callback for the customer to answer? What if that call goes to voicemail? What if the line is busy?

And finally, some small amount of agent training is also required.

Everyone has to bend a little

Yes, this pops the bubble of the pure “no-touch” installation that makes the cloud-based approach so attractive. But it is still a fraction of the effort compared with installing hardware at the call center. And our early results indicate that there is still very good ROI for the company. I hope to share some of those results on this blog in the near future.