In a high traffic customer service environment, it is easy for an agent to be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of messages that arrive. This can lead to reduced efficiency. The constant alerts from new messages can be distracting. The cost of focus switching between messages agents are dealing with can slow them down.
It can be more efficient to let agents deal with a smaller number of messages at a time before offering them their next message.
There are two ways you can manage how much an agent has to deal with at once.
- Maximum active contacts
- Agent capacity
Maximum active contacts
The simplest way to manage how many contacts your agents can deal with simultaneously is to set a limit on it. This limit applies only to the number of messages an agent can deal with. An agent can only ever deal with one call at a time, and when a call comes in, it can be offered to any agent regardless of the number of messages they currently have active.
In your Admin account:
- Go to the General Settings page.
- Go to the Global settings subpage.
In the Message channel settings section:
- Click to tick the Enable agent capacity checkbox.
- Type a value for Number of simultaneous contacts an agent can have.
- Click the Save button at the top of the page.
In this example, once an agent has seven active contacts, they will not be offered any more messages from the message queues until they drop below the limit.
Understanding agent capacity rules
Setting an overall capacity limitation is useful, but there is a difference between handling seven emails at once and trying to juggle seven simultaneous webchats. If you want to have more fine control over the types of messages an agent can handle at a time you can create capacity rules.
Before you start...
The way we define capacity rules in LeadDesk is extremely flexible, allowing you to create such rules as:
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Don't offer the agent another email if they are already dealing with:
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This level of control also brings a risk of complexity.
It is recommended that you spend some time planning out what you want the rules to be before starting into the tool. It may help to write out the scenarios in which you would consider that agent would be too busy to receive more emails, more webchats, or more of whichever message channels you use.
Use these notes to help build the rules you want.
Calls
The capacity rules are for message channels. The agent can only be on one call at a time.
Manual contacts
If an agent uses the Manual contact to send an email to a contact, these emails do not count towards the limitations for capacity rules.
Snoozing messages
The capacity rules assume that the agent is actively working on their active contacts. If an agent is waiting for a response before assigning a call ending reason, that message will still be active, and count towards their capacity limit, even though they are not actively handling that email.
Agents can snooze messages like these so they do not count against the capacity rules until the reply arrives and the agent begins actively working on that contact again.
Creating capacity rules
For full details on how to create agent capacity rules see the article Creating agent capacity rules.
Applying agent capacity rules
Capacity rules can be applied to all agents in an agent group, or to individual agents. Rules applied to a specific agent will override rules applied to the group that agent is in, if any.
For more see the article Applying agent capacity rules.