Often organisations will see sudden peak loads on the contact centre during the key business activities e.g. Easter or Christmas trading, summer sales, the release of new products, promotion sales, product issues (e.g. recalls), and so on.

This issue has been particularly evident with our retail customers and often was one of the key drivers for a new email automation solution (please see the Argos and Tesco endorsements). Indeed, numéro has developed detailed cost analyses documenting the internal costs to address these business peak demand cycles (please ask for further details).

In these situations, the business must make a key business decision:

• to respond to the challenge and maintain the existing service levels by recruiting more agents into the Contact Centre to handle the inbound contacts or alternatively,
• to retain the existing agents to manage the volume and to accept the consequences of the reduced service levels.

The resultant response by the business is highly revealing: those organisations who value their customers and follow the service mantra will recruit more staff; for those organisations who accept the consequences of lower service levels – they maintain the “as is”.

The business consequences of recruiting more staff can be considerable:

the management team must plan the peak program well in advance

• the personnel department will need to advertise and recruit the temporary staff
• the operations team will need to arrange more space and facilities
• the IT team will need to acquire more workstations and network services
• the training department will need to train the new staff and certify their quality
• the new recruits will need to be blended into the existing teams and run in parallel before the expected rush in demand
• the contact centre will need to monitor the quality of the new staff intake more rigorously.

Of course, this process assumes that the organisation can actually recruit the staff in a timely manner. In our experiences, this recruitment process is not assured because often there are conflicting recruitment drives as rival contact centres expand their operations too (especially as contact centres tend to be localised in geographical pockets and so compete for the same, scarce resource).

A further second, but equally important point – this additional labour requirement is for a set of skilled agents who are able to construct written texts compliant with the company’s quality policies. Hence, even if the labour is available, it may not be of the required skill level!