Multi-contact scheduling

In a multi-contact The entire communication experience for a customer, from beginning to end. environment, employees respond to customers through various communication channels, such as email, web chat, and Voice over IP (VoIP).

Media types and queues

Some organizations require employees to respond to customers through various media. The WFM application helps managers schedule employees who can handle customer interactions using different media types.

The WFM application associates each media type with a queue Entity that represents demand in WFM. Queues help predict workload by multiplying the volume of customer interactions by their expected handling time.. You can also associate a skill Defined level of knowledge that an employee needs in order to handle a defined workload in WFM. with various media, including phone, email, fax, web chat, call back and Voice over IP (VoIP).

Different media are categorized with different answering types, depending on the urgency of the response:

Immediate: Answered when the request arrives. If it is not answered within a certain time, customers abandon the interaction In Speech Analytics, an interaction represents a single part of the contact between one employee and the same customer. In Text Analytics, an interaction is the communication session between one or more employees and the same customer with a unifying contextual element.. Includes phone, chat, and VoIP.
Deffered: Answer can be delayed for a later time. Includes email, fax, and callback.

Deferred media do not have an Abandon parameter, but instead have a Backlog. Backlog is a group of interactions left over from previous intervals that still need to be answered. Deferred media typically have a longer service level Set percentage of interactions in WFM that are handled in a defined unit of time. and handling times, typically measured in hours or even days.

Multi-contact routing

In WFM, you can model three different types of multi-contact routing:

Dedicated employee groups model: Each media has a group of employees who handle only that media and do not handle interactions from any other queue. While there can be skill-based routing within each media, there is no mixing of interactions between the media.
Media hopping: Each employee works with one media type for a length of time, and then switches to another type. While employees can work with more than one media type during the day, they cannot work with more than one answer type at any time.
True blending: Employees can be routed interactions from any media at any time. For example, an employee can be handling a phone call, then an email message, and then another phone call.