I looked at this piece of furniture that is being marketed as the next best thing for call center managers. It’s called the Traveler Mobile Desk from Interior Concepts. It’s pretty nifty but it took me some time to visualize having this desk in a call center environment.
If we consider having supervisors use this, it’s a bit funny and awkward to see them lagging the desk to go to agents and work at their stations. So, however hard I try, I can only see this in a training environment.
A training room has to be flexible and layouts shouldn’t be the typical classroom set-up. There are situations when you need to share your room with 2 different clients and they would have different requirements. This poses a problem. Another one would be getting a lot of PCs in the room due to the size of the class, yet there are only a number of sockets available, ending up with wires all over the place. This is a horrendous sight!
-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer
Communications service provider Bell Canada used ICCM Canada, the customer contact management conference and expo, to wax eloquent about its workforce management (WFM) system from the IEX Corporation, IEX TotalView. Fifteen years old and still going strong after a few upgrades as and when needed, the solution has enabled the call centers of Bell Canada to make the transition from a set of diverse units to one, integrated, centralized WFM system.
The company has been able to establish common business practices and systems for scheduling agents across all its call centers in Canada. The Quebec offices benefited from the upgrade to the bilingual version of IEX TotalView, with the needs of both French and English speakers to service.
Carla Blake, manager of client experience at Bell Canada, said that the company owed the success of the new system entirely to its 6,450-strong workforce. Despite initial resistance from customers who were used to local agents attending calls, the company leveraged the expertise of key employees who acted as super agents and did their best to spread best practices, conduct focus groups, and seek feedback from employees and clients.