Several studies have shown that the call center idle time issue the second most impactful factor which can affect the profitability of a contact center, second only to a none-lean workflow. In fact, an Aberdeen survey showed agents waste almost 2 hours of idle time during a standard 8-hour shift. This leads to a weekly waste of 10 hours, considering 5 workdays in a week. That is, to reiterate, over a full business day wasted for every 4 days worked.

Now, let’s take a top view of a contact center where 100 agents are working. Assuming a basic $10 per hour pay structure for the agents, the center stands to lose 100 (agents) * 2 (hours/day) * 10 (paid/hr) = $2,000 every day, or $60,000 every month. This is serious leakage which has an adverse impact on the contact center’s bottom line.

This is exactly where Qubicles can come to your rescue. Qubicles allows contact center owners to auction or sell the idle time of the employees on the Qubicles network. Other contact center owners or businesses, who might be needing extra hands to handle incoming customer contact, can hire these hands to meet the demand.

This is a win-win situation for everybody. Why? Simply because, while the first contact center owner can nullify or lessen the leakage due to employee idle time, the contact center requiring extra hands can also instantly access, and employ, trained and certified contact center employees. There is no need to hire extra hands for a surge period for the 2nd contact center.

Let’s take a use case scenario. Suppose, WorldComm Contact Center is owned by Alex; Alex knows there is a surge of incoming contacts during mid-day when the calls increase by as much as 20% between 11 am to 2 pm. Using the normal workforce, the network congestion (customer wait time in queue) can increase to as much as 25 minutes. This is unacceptable for their client, a leading telecom giant. To meet this, Alex has hired 10% extra employee which brought down the congestion to 8 minutes.

However, during the off-peak time, the 10% additional employees hired are spending a significant percentage of their time in idle. So basically, Alex pays full day’s salary to use them for 3 hours. What a royal waste of time and money! And we have not included the effort, time and money Alex has spent in recruiting these agents.

Had Alex been a user of Qubicles, he could have avoided this problem with a few clicks. The process would have been as simple as logging in to the Qubicles network, posting the job, finding the experienced and certified employees directly and hiring them only for the peak hours required. In most cases, there would be no need to arrange even the workstations, as agents working remotely or within an existing contact center would possess the facilities to handle customer interactions. Alex can even hire 20% additional hands for the peak hours and further bring the customer wait time as closest to zero as possible; all while keeping the cost down to the absolute minimum required.

We have already answered how the Qubicles network ensures that the hired agents are qualified for the job in this blog post. Basically, Qubicles University, a fully integrated, decentralized learning center offers certifications which the agents can pick up. The hiring manager can mention the required certifications in an ideal candidate.

However, Alex is not free from the employee idle time issue. His employees also waste 2 hours a day during non-peak hours. Alex is clever and he sells that additional time on the Qubicles network, thus recovering his expenses for the extra hands hired during peak hours. This way, he recovers almost all the expenses he made on the extra hands and, ideally, makes an additional profit from the sale of this excess capacity in the form of idle time.

This is the most innovative solution which every single contact center can benefit from. Qubicles is the panacea to a significant ailment of contact centers.