Workforce Engagement Management

Hi All, 

My organization is hoping to reduce queues but I am the only one familiar with planning groups and forecasting and I have some concerns. All of my learning in this area has been on my own so forgive any ignorance. 

I have agents at two different locations, one local and one outsource. Currently each group occupies its own business unit. While some similar volume is shared, it's always split between queues. For example, if a customer service call comes in, architect looks at the level of the caller, and customers assigned to higher levels will be funneled to a queue with local agents, while all other calls will be funneled to a separate queue at our outsource vendor. I believe we could potentially do the same thing within one queue using skills, where the local agents have a skill for high level callers and the outsource agents have a skill for low level callers, and I think this is what my organization would like to do. I'm not seeing how this is tenable for reporting and forecasting, though. I keep track of volume by location based on queue division, I'm not sure if there is a simple way of reporting this, perhaps pulling calls by agent division. It's vital that I can account for interactions for these groups separately for purposes of forecasting and billing according to contract obligations with my vendor. 

-Does one queue make sense here or should I argue for sticking to splitting queues when split between locations?

-Can I put the same queue in multiple planning groups if the skill is different? So, could the customer service queue-high level skill live in a planning group under my local business unit while the customer service queue-low level skill lives in the business unit for my vendor? 

-If doing this successfully would mean moving all agents to one business unit and separating locations by management unit, how disruptive is that to historical data? I believe it would break existing schedules and adherence until the next group of schedules is generated, but what happens to the historical data of interactions taken by those agents? How would I determine volume of calls taken by each group? 

I also have concerns that this may make real time monitoring more complicated and difficult, since most things I'm familiar with for that process are based on queues. 

Thanks in advance. If there is any resource that already covers these questions, please let me know.