Our service desk takes about nine hundred calls a day. Callers choose from a short menu, and the phone system sends each call to an agent who holds the matching skill: head office, depots, drivers or passwords. The skills are a table in the telephony platform, set agent by agent.
In March the average wait for depot callers reached eleven minutes, and about a quarter of them hung up before anybody answered. Over the same weeks the platform reported our agents as idle for thirty eight percent of their logged in time. Both figures were on the same wallboard, at opposite ends of it, and for a month each one was discussed in a different meeting.
The cause was a reorganisation in January. We had merged the depot support team into the general desk, trained everyone to handle depot calls and moved the specialists' desks. Nobody changed the skills table. The depot option on the menu still routed only to the six agents who had held the depot skill in 2023, two of whom had since left and one of whom was on long term sick leave. Three people were answering a queue meant for twenty two. The other nineteen, perfectly able to help, never heard a depot call ring.
It was nobody's job to notice. The team leaders managed rotas and training in the workforce system. The telephony platform belonged to the network team, who changed the skills table when somebody asked them to, and nobody had asked. We had made a staffing decision in one system and left the system that actually hands out the work exactly as it was.
The skills table is now owned by the service desk manager, who can change it without raising a ticket. It is rebuilt each morning from the workforce system, which already knows every agent's training and shift, so the person trained on a queue is the person who receives its calls. Any queue with callers waiting more than three minutes while agents in the same team are idle raises an alert on the wallboard. And every change to the structure of the desk now includes a line for the phone system, signed off by whoever made the change.
The depot wait fell to under two minutes in the first week.
Who answers a call is decided by a routing table, not by the organisation chart. We had reorganised the team and left the calls organised the old way.
– Serguey Shinder
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