A second approach would be to increase the agent population and hence, increase the available manual effort to respond to customers. Unfortunately, whilst this approach can address small changes in demand or usage, this method suffers as the inbound volumes grow quickly or the business volumes show marked variability (for example at peak times).

Although the processes are similar to those for handling inbound calls, the nature of the online transaction may create its own different issues. Online customers demand agents who are excellent problem-solvers and so it becomes essential that your service agents possess not only the skills necessary to handle incoming calls but also a wide range of other abilities, such as writing, editing, proof reading, grammatical accuracy, and knowledge of the subject matter. Expectations of the agents will be different for this online world, for example:

"Amazon.com is seeking bright, articulate, detail-oriented customer service representatives for entry-level positions to service Amazon.com's growing, global customer base. The positions involve challenging front-line interaction with the public via telephone and e-mail. A typical day involves a lot of problem-solving, creative thinking and teamwork. Ideal candidates will be computer-literate, flexible, type 30 words per minute, and have excellent verbal and written communication skills. Applicants should be proactive, personable and respond positively to the challenges of a dynamic work environment" (Online advertisement).

So even if the organisation does you succeed in recruiting sufficient agents of the right calibre and at the right costs then the contact centre is still faced with the task of upgrading their skills constantly to keep pace with rapid changes in the online environment.

By implication, the contact centre will need to enhance its training curriculum to include web training, independent and Web-based e-mail response, business writing, and keyboard skills. The training will involve teaching your agents "netiquette" (the art of responding to customer e-mail using a professional, on-line writing style).

In order to ensure that your agents avoid writing anything that may cause legal complications, the organisation must also pay close attention to the format and wording of all e-mail messages that your agents send. The customer responses should be timely, accurate, clear and complete, with short sentences. The organisation will need to monitor agent responses wherever possible to ensure consistency, correctness and compliance to corporate / industry standards.

So increasing the number of agents brings with it, a new set of issues to manage due to the rise in labour costs, the effort and resource required to train and maintain this increasing population, the general overhead to support and accommodate the staff and general management of the staff.

Clearly, simply increasing the number of agents without any technology support creates significant quality issues. The outbound response quality becomes difficult to maintain and at the same time, the support systems data becomes increasingly poor as more agents cut and paste data into their backend support applications.

Of course, a recent trend has been to outsource the contact centre, often to lower cost labour countries. Whilst this approach may be acceptable for a telephony environment (and there appears to be much evidence suggesting problems even with this approach) where often technology can support the agent action, this working style may not be wholly suitable for outbound email services. There are well documented issues when the response services are outsourced to these low labour cost locations and the output involves delivering constructed, written responses. Whilst costs may appear lower, there are many hidden problems especially around first time resolution, quality, technology support, and so on.