Your call center goes back to its usual pace post the extremely hectic and challenging holiday season. You return the employees to their regular operational hours. Any temporary staff hired during the busy period gets slashed.
The agent deactivation feature is designed so that managers of call centers have an easier life when confronted with adjusting the staffing demands.
Describing Agent Deactivation
It is a feature of call center software which permits the managers of call centers to remove agents from the roster, sans any loss of deleting related data. Agent deletion is an alternative to agent activation. The latter is total removal of the account of an agent. The matter of agent deactivation could be performed on an individual basis for a particular agent or could be done in bulk for a large number of agents. You can choose the agents to deactivate. Do note that agents who do not have direct call routings or dedicated line can be deactivated.
Agent deactivation advantages
The feature is specifically useful when call centers deal with fluctuating or seasonal staffing. When an agent finishes his or her tenure, deactivation in many ways is more preferable compared to deletion. There are a number of reasons supporting this decision.
Accuracy of historical reports are maintained
Even after the deactivation of agents, the software preserves the call data. This makes sure that any historical call report which you may run in future continues to be accurate. In case of deletion of an agent, the reports will not reflect associated call data. The metrics of call center are heavily skewed. This may lead to imperfect decisions being made.
Increase of onboarding efficiency
In case your call center witness same seasonal agents time after time, it could be time consuming to reconfigure the ring groups and a number of other associated settings. This tough task can be eliminated by supervisors by the simple deactivation of seasonal agents. The deactivated agents can preserve their call center settings in case they return to the same company and same work. This leads to an efficient and quick ramp up.
Conserving time when scaling down
The process of deleting agents could be tiresome as it needs every agent to be deleted individually. There is no requirement to manually execute this task. Supervisors of call centers could conserve large amounts of money by deactivating the agents. Just check off the agents who should be deactivated. The software will complete the process.
What happens when an agent undergoes deactivation?
Post the deactivation of a particular agent, the routing settings will automatically point to “Never”, thus making sure that there will be a proper routing of all calls, even when the agent ceases to be active. Managers of call centers can continue to view and also edit the settings of deactivated agents like they normally do-but with one exception. The status will show “deactivated”. They will also not be counted when there is a requirement for licenses towards billing purposes.
In case there is a run of historical call report, the voicemail assignments and call histories of deactivated agents can be made available for reference. This will permit supervisors to contrast the performance across a number of teams- even as the team no longer exist.
Best practices for removal of agents
You should take the following steps when you want to remove any agent from the support team:
- Reassign the tickets of the agent
- Downgrade the role of the agent
- Suspend the account of the agent
Reassign tickets
When any agent leaves, the prime priority is to ensure that any tickets handled by that particular agent is maintained. This activity could be managed by rest of the team. In an ideal situation, exiting agent must be capable to reassign tickets that are assigned with them prior to completion of their tenure. Admin has the power to reassign tickets if the agent cannot handle the task.
Downgrading role of agent
You should maintain information of tickets managed in the past after the agent leaves. It is for this reason any agent should be deleted when they leave. There is no need to do this: simply downgrade the account and suspend it. If these methods are followed, the reporting information maintains their fidelity for any future reference.
Suspending agent’s account
This is the ultimate step and will stop agent from website login. This is done just after the downgrade of the agent.
Reactivation
This software feature assists you to activate agents and also deactivate them with single click. When the agents are reactivated, they can start to work as usual. All settings except routing settings are preserved. Supervisors have no need to reconfigure the agents every time they return to work. Call centers can use the agent deactivation future to scale up and also down with increased efficiency.