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What is Non-live Staffing and why is it Important?
Natasha Ratanshi-Stein , Founder & CEO
What is Non-live Staffing?
Non-live staffing is the way customer experience teams are scheduled on channels where customer requests don’t need to be dealt with in real-time. An example of this is email. Email tickets don’t just disappear after a certain amount of time the way phone tickets do if a call isn’t picked up. This means that when scheduling customer experience teams, managers need to schedule non-live channels differently compared to live channels like phone and chat.
Customer experience teams often have much longer target response times when it comes to non-live channels like email, which means immediately handling these kinds of tickets isn’t necessary in order to meet service level agreements. This gives customer success teams many different ways to adequately staff a non-live channel.
Why is Non-live Staffing Important?
If there’s one thing we know, it’s the importance of shift planning for customer service teams. However, not all shifts are created equal. Weekend shifts may experience less calls and can be used to work on backlogs while things are quieter. Midweek shifts may, conversely, be super busy with calls and live chat. Therefore, it makes more sense to look at the total amount of hours it takes to handle the different types of customer issues, both live and non-live. The importance here is to ensure that staffing levels within customer experience teams are planned efficiently, and that you have the ability to forecast levels of demand over time. Without using non-live staffing methods, this becomes increasingly difficult.
How Surfboard Utilises Non-live Staffing
The key to a good schedule is appropriate staffing of both live and non-live channels. We’re improving Surfboard’s ability to efficiently schedule non-live channels by flexing them around live activities, finding quieter times to answer emails and other non-live tickets, whilst also giving customer experience teams proper visibility over how well they are staffing non-live channels.
With Surfboard, you can automatically and accurately turn forecasted ticket volumes into staffing requirements for non-live channels like email, social media, and even snail mail. When these types of ticket groups spike in volume, we’ll smooth out that demand over the coming hours, helping your customer experience team meet SLAs more efficiently.