Open Forum

Hi,

We have a service centre where agents deal with phone and email interactions concurrently.
The agents are expected to work on emails until a call comes in, which takes higher priority. At this point they will need to park the email until they are free to continue working on it - i.e. there are no calls in the queue.
However, we are finding that with 8x8 as soon as one email is completed/wrapped, the next is delivered and so the agent is never available for calls. If the wrap time is not long enough to complete the email transaction, the agent will be delivered another email and so on until they make themselves as not available - also meaning they will not get calls.
We were expecting to be able to place a max number of concurrent emails on an agent, as you can with chat, which would solve this issue.
Is anyone else managing to work around this? Looking for ideas!
We are currently pulling emails rather than having delivered because of this but that has it's own issues including not being able to pull unless in unavailable.

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Julie Sperritt
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I will only reply with what I have been told hoping that someone has a better answer. in 8x8 is a contact like any other contact and based on your configuration, the oldest contact will be delivered to the next available person. So if you have a large queue of emails, it is very possible that they have been in queue longer than the new calls or chats. Unlike other systems where the email can be interrupted by a live contact, my understanding is that it is currently not possible in 8x8.

I new to my organization, so I am hoping that I am wrong or that at least there is a way to make it work with some scripting. Would love to be able to add the email skills to our folks rather than how we handle today.   


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Pedro Fred
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 05:55
From: Julie Sperritt
Subject: Email Interactions - limiting the number delivered per agent

Hi,

We have a service centre where agents deal with phone and email interactions concurrently.
The agents are expected to work on emails until a call comes in, which takes higher priority. At this point they will need to park the email until they are free to continue working on it - i.e. there are no calls in the queue.
However, we are finding that with 8x8 as soon as one email is completed/wrapped, the next is delivered and so the agent is never available for calls. If the wrap time is not long enough to complete the email transaction, the agent will be delivered another email and so on until they make themselves as not available - also meaning they will not get calls.
We were expecting to be able to place a max number of concurrent emails on an agent, as you can with chat, which would solve this issue.
Is anyone else managing to work around this? Looking for ideas!
We are currently pulling emails rather than having delivered because of this but that has it's own issues including not being able to pull unless in unavailable.

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Julie Sperritt
------------------------------

Our Agents discovered a process which works for them. Our priority is voice calls, and as emails may take a few minutes to upto an hour, it was interrupting our call flow.

They discovered that if they pull a few emails and assign them to themselves, they can then go Available for phone calls. Now that the emails are assigned them, they can work on them without worrying about their status changing for emails. 

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Ben Fischer
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 05:55
From: Julie Sperritt
Subject: Email Interactions - limiting the number delivered per agent

Hi,

We have a service centre where agents deal with phone and email interactions concurrently.
The agents are expected to work on emails until a call comes in, which takes higher priority. At this point they will need to park the email until they are free to continue working on it - i.e. there are no calls in the queue.
However, we are finding that with 8x8 as soon as one email is completed/wrapped, the next is delivered and so the agent is never available for calls. If the wrap time is not long enough to complete the email transaction, the agent will be delivered another email and so on until they make themselves as not available - also meaning they will not get calls.
We were expecting to be able to place a max number of concurrent emails on an agent, as you can with chat, which would solve this issue.
Is anyone else managing to work around this? Looking for ideas!
We are currently pulling emails rather than having delivered because of this but that has it's own issues including not being able to pull unless in unavailable.

------------------------------
Julie Sperritt
------------------------------

We deal with calls and emails. Originally we only dealt with emails on a "pull" basis, but currently we're trialling "push" for some email queues that are for quicker services. As long as the queue is kept to a minimum this is working for us.

We've increased the wrap time on "push" queues and the priority for the queue is set lower than voice interactions. The main issue we have is we close over the weekend so emails can build up over that time and impact a Monday morning if we don't disable the agents.

I'm looking at schedules for the email scripts to get round this, say making the email queue closed until 10am, past our busy morning rush on a Monday. The problem I've found testing this is it won't send an auto reply unless I then have the email forward to the queue, which defeats the purpose of using the schedule. I've raised a call with our support provider to see if there is some way round this as we currently send auto replies to acknowledge receipt of the email and don't want people on a Friday evening waiting until Monday morning to get a reply.

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Dawn Guthrie
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 05:55
From: Julie Sperritt
Subject: Email Interactions - limiting the number delivered per agent

Hi,

We have a service centre where agents deal with phone and email interactions concurrently.
The agents are expected to work on emails until a call comes in, which takes higher priority. At this point they will need to park the email until they are free to continue working on it - i.e. there are no calls in the queue.
However, we are finding that with 8x8 as soon as one email is completed/wrapped, the next is delivered and so the agent is never available for calls. If the wrap time is not long enough to complete the email transaction, the agent will be delivered another email and so on until they make themselves as not available - also meaning they will not get calls.
We were expecting to be able to place a max number of concurrent emails on an agent, as you can with chat, which would solve this issue.
Is anyone else managing to work around this? Looking for ideas!
We are currently pulling emails rather than having delivered because of this but that has it's own issues including not being able to pull unless in unavailable.

------------------------------
Julie Sperritt
------------------------------