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Frequently Asked Questions
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What is Call Center Designer?
Call Center Designer is a tool for call center managers to determine the most efficient staffing for each
period of time throughout the workday. In the Day Planner module, the user enters the start and end of the
work day, the desired service level, call volumes with average talk and wrap-up time for each time period
throughout the day. The optimum agent and inbound line levels are then calculated along with
performance predictions on queue times and agent performance.
In the Staffing module plots number of agents against such performance values as average speed to
answer, queue length, agent occupancy and other predicted values. The critical break-off points were
service levels become unacceptable can be established for the busy hour, least busy hour or average hour
of the workday.
What is SimACD?
SimACD is an add-on module to Call Center Designer. It provides the ability to test and try out different
“what if” situations before actually implementing them in the call center. Enter or download expected call
volumes with the number of agents and trunks you plan on using for each time period in the workday,
along with the abandon and re-try behavior of your callers, and the ring delay and overflow characteristics
of your ACD. SimACD then simulates the call arrivals and displays how many calls were queued,
overflowed, blocked, received a busy, and how quickly they were answered.
The simulation algorithm corrects the well known defects of Erlang-C type formulas and can be used to
refine the output of Call Center Designer by accurately taking into account caller abandonment, re-try,
overflow, and correct probability distributions of talk and queue times.
What is AgentTime?
AgentTime is the affordable new agent scheduling solution is designed specifically for small and medium
sized call centers. AgentTime creates agent employee schedules from a database of agents, shift
definitions, agent availability, agent preferences and agent priorities entered by the call center manager. It
uses the agent level requirements from each time period in a call center’s workweek determined by Call
Center Designer and SimACD staffing software. It includes, and is tightly integrated with these products.
What is the basic difference between Call Center Designer and SimACD?
Call Center Designer tells you the number of agents needed to reach a desired service level, whereas you
tell SimACD the number of agents you want to use and you then see what service levels result. Call Center
Designer uses statistical methods (Erlang formulas) to calculate optimum staffing levels and call center
performance data based on call volumes and services levels that you enter. SimACD uses random
number generation techniques to simulate the minute to minute operation of an ACD and presents what
will happen with various agent and inbound line combinations. Call Center Designer is used to obtain
baseline agent levels, then if needed, SimACD is used to refine these values by accurately taking into
account caller abandonment and retrial behavior, ACD overflow, ring delay, and a more accurate modeling
of call lengths and queue duration. Both products do financial calculations based on expense and revenue
data entered. You will see the profit per call, inbound line and agent costs, etc. You can also determine
what agent levels are best for profit as opposed to the service level you provide to callers.
What kinds of call centers use Call Center Designer and SimACD?
Small and medium sized call centers that have between 10 and 75 or so agents. Usually these call
centers cannot afford the "full-blown" workforce management systems that sell for $25,000.00 to
$200,000.00. They use our products for staffing analysis and scheduling to accurately seat the right
number of agents at the right times. Inaccurate staffing is actually more harmful in the smaller the call
center as the addition or subtraction of just one or two agents can have dramatic effects on call center
productivity. (See our white paper: A Primer on Call Center Staffing).
Many large call centers also use our products for in-depth staffing analysis to supplement their workforce
management and scheduling systems. Rather than just accepting the static calculations these systems
tell them, they use Call Center Designer and SimACD to "play with the numbers" and do "what-if" analysis
to show them how to improve their operations and what the effects of different call patterns and agent
arrangements will have on customer service and call center costs.
Our AgentTime scheduler is more flexible than the competition as well. It allows users to change the
calculated schedules on the fly to reflect their personal knowledge and situations that cannot be
programmed into a scheduling algorithm. It doesn't force the user to accept schedules that they might
deem unreasonable.
What is your update policy?
Whenever a new version of our products is released, we notify our installed customers and provide a free
update via email or disk if there has been no price change. If a new version entails an increase in the price
of our products, current users will get a significant price break.
What kind of technical support do you provide?
Free telephone support is given 8:00am to 5:00pm PST Monday through Friday. Sometimes you may need
to leave a message, but you will always get a call back the same day. We can also schedule free over-the-
phone training sessions using our demo data files, or with your own call volume and scheduling data.
Do you have a demo?
We have a product demonstration. Call us at 1-800-647-7640 or 831-647-7001 to receive a free Demo
Disk . There is a "readme" file in the demo with general information and a tutorial on our software. The
demo is a limited version of our actual software.
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