How to Prevent Call Center Idle Time

When it comes to contact centers, every second counts. So the time call center workers spend offline can represent lost money and opportunity.

Call centers agents and managers can’t spend every moment of their workdays on the phone, of course. However, there are things that people who oversee contact centers can do to ensure their workers spend more time helping customers and less time sitting idle.

One is listening in on conversations and/or recording them and reviewing them later. That way, contact centers can ensure all calls are of a business nature. And they can ensure agents spend their time on the line talking with callers about relevant topics related to the business at hand.

Arrival, departure, and break times can also be a drain on productivity when workers show up later than scheduled. So managers should be away of the comings and goings of staff members. They might also review call logs to ensure agents start taking calls shortly after their scheduled returns and until close to their scheduled departure times. If late arrivals, early departures, and/or delays in getting back on the phone become a pattern, managers should take agents aside to let them know the business is aware of it and encourage improvement on this front.

Reviewing status logs can also help contact center managers see if agents are periodically logging off the system. Everybody needs to take an occasional bathroom or stretching break, and making themselves unavailable to take calls for these reasons occasionally is fine. But when agents habitually mark themselves on the call system as unavailable, which makes them fall to the bottom of the call center queue, that could be a sign they are manipulating the system so they have more idle time.

A similar thing can sometimes happen after an agent has wrapped up a call. At the end of an interaction with a customer, the call doesn’t necessarily always register on the call center system as having been terminated. The agent has to actively end the call so the system puts them in line to take another call. But some agents don’t do that, either because they don’t understand the situation or because they want a little extra time to take a breather. So the onus is on contact center managers to educate staff members when they see this kind of thing and tell them to immediately and actively terminate the call.

Speaking of post-call activity (or lack of it), contact center managers can eliminate idle time by making sure agents use post-call wrapup time for that purpose. They can do that by reviewing call logs, email communications, and internet browsing to make sure time off the phone between calls aligns with business expectations and to ensure email and internet activities are of a business nature.

Edited by Maurice Nagle