Originally posted by Chaz Holmes;36272
I am being requested to do the same. Do not count time for email service level when we are closed. The service level for email response is 24 business (open) hours. The Business is open 7:00-19:00, Monday-Friday.
If we schedule as email attendant, so as not to allow queing when closed, we will see a large influx of interactions, at opening time, on Monday morning. Also scheduling email attendant will prevent interaction from queuing when we are closed, yet, an interaction already in the queue, when the business closes will continue to increment time, until the next business day.
The only avenue I can think of is to statistically average closed duration, and subtract this from the SL.
You could also do as some contact centers have done, which is to close the queue by schedule earlier so that there is time for all the emails that are in queue at the schedule close to be handled before the agent shift ends. That would entail changing the advertised open hours for email as well.
If this is a blended contact center, and agents need to handle calls first thing in the morning, you would either need to delay the queue open, or use Utilization settings to allow agents to receive email and calls at the same time, with a reasonable maximum number of simultaneous emails.
The other problem introduced by schedules for email queues, of course, is that the automated response from Attendant only gets sent when the email hits the queue, so someone could send an email at 19:01 on Friday, get the automated response at 07:00 on Monday, and a reply from an agent at 07:05 on Monday. I've worked around that by having two queues, the first of which is open all the time and sends the automated response, then via the Reply CC's another mailbox which has a scheduled queue, but that makes things difficult trying to get the From: address correct when the email gets routed to an agent. No really good solution.
Of course, when an email sits in queue all weekend waiting for agents to go on queue, the truthful SL really is the 60 or so hours that gets reported...but managers don't want to see that true SL :-)