We are a somewhat small call center (~150 agents) handling mostly B2B business. We have over 700 wrap up codes - WAY too many. Many Leaders here though are always very set on getting very fine detail, yet I dont see this often used in a manner that makes use of the interaction. Are there any industry best practices or standards around Wrap Codes other than "dont create too many"? Any math or ratio's to consider?

I thought that our call centre having 50 was too many. Are all of these Inbound Wrap or are some Dispositions for outbound calls? We have ours limited down within scripter so the agents select the 'success' page and gets presented with 25, and 'unsuccessful' page another 25 options. In addition to this, we have removed a few wrap codes on outbound by adding 3 editable fields in to scripter which write directly back to the contact list. This data can then be pulled off from SQL giving you the detail you need (these can be drop down or fully editable text) unfortunately as we are predominantly outbound I don't have a suggestion if your issue is with inbound codes. Mac

If the wrap codes are not evenly distributed (i.e 1.5% values are used on 95% of interactions), then when an agent is confronted with a call that does not conform to the norm, he has to decide the most appropriate code for the situation at hand (1 or 2 calls per day). The larger the number of low use items is, the more likely it is that agents will be unable to use them. For example: Agent receives 100 calls per day. 10 codes are are used on 95% of calls 5 calls get a code that is one of 690 options. With 690 options to categorize each of 5 anomalies, chosen by 150 different agents you can expect a high error rate. We are an inbound C2B shop and have 7 codes. 6 standard codes (Complaint, General Info, Payment, Status, Documents, Other) and 1 that changes based on system issues, current mail campaigns, or natural disasters (or whatever we want to track at the moment). If we start getting a lot of "Other" the Ops team investigates the individual calls to decide if something needs action. Not really a "Best Practices" answer, but there is some math.

Wrap Up Codes answer the question "How many...?" - how many calls were related to such-and-such, what percentage of calls were of a certain category, etc. For wrap up codes to be useful, they must: - be selected... consistently - be used for reporting purposes or to make meaningful changes In other words, if agents do not consistently select accurate wrap up codes, then the data they provide will not be useful. And if they do, but nobody is making use of the data they provide, then they are equally useless. My recommendation is generally to limit wrap up codes to a small list (perhaps 10-20) that provide meaningful data and can be quickly selected. A list of hundreds is unlikely to be useful... though I'll admit there may be exceptional use cases.

Originally posted by Mac;34129
I thought that our call centre having 50 was too many. Are all of these Inbound Wrap or are some Dispositions for outbound calls? Mac

These are inbound and outbound across...150 workgroups? We are multi-channel (Phone/Email/Fax) and we separate them all out by workgroup. One workgroup for each type. On top of this, due to reasons within this company for how they do reporting, we also then separate out by team. The way we use the system is very, very different from nearly everyone else. Still, even when I remove the 500 or so that haven't been used in 6 months, 200 seems too high. Spread across all of the workgroups we have, Id think 100 (and not every workgroup has all 700 or would have 100 - most have 20-30) but the fact that each workgroup has 20-30 and many agents work in many different workgroups, it means each workgroup poses a new set of wrap up codes - especially when they backup other teams. Thanks for the input everyone, especially tcannon for the math. That will help sell my case next week.