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Front Desk / The four channels
Turn 01 - the doors
The four channels
A channel is usually chosen for convenience. From the desk side it is a choice between an agent time budget, a queue and a record: the same question costs 3.15 in a chat, 7.70 by email and 2.63 on the phone, and leaves three different kinds of evidence.
Desk stub
- Cheapest contact
- chat, 3.15 of agent time
- Most expensive
- email, 7.70 for the same answer
- Fastest to a person
- phone, but only inside its opening hours
- Weakest record
- a call recording, kept for 6 months
- Strongest record
- a chat transcript, kept for 24 months
the turnOne numbered serving of a contact, with its clock and what it cost the desk
the ceilingWhat a level may give away without asking, set by the evidence it can see
the transcriptThe only record that a contact happened, kept 24 months on this sample
Direct answerChat, email, phone and social are four separate queues with four handling times and four records. On the sample desk chat is 74% of contacts and 58.9% of the handling cost, email is 18% of contacts and 35.0% of the cost, and the record each leaves differs in kind: a transcript, a thread, a recording or a public reply.
Channel the door a contact arrives throughUnit the contact - one question, one agent, one recordHandling time 9.0 chat / 22.0 email / 7.5 phone / 12.0 social, in agent minutesRate used 21.00 an agent-hour, on every channel, so the only variable is timeBoundary the standards each channel promises are on /the-standards
What each channel costs
The same rate applied to four handling times - the only thing that changes is the minutes
channel contacts share handling time cost each cost in the month
chat 8,880 74% 9.0 min 3.15 27,972.00 58.9% of it
email 2,160 18% 22.0 min 7.70 16,632.00 35.0%
phone 720 6% 7.5 min 2.63 1,890.00 4.0%
social 240 2% 12.0 min 4.20 1,008.00 2.1%
total 12,000 100% 47,502.00
one email is worth 2.44 chats in agent time 22.0 / 9.0 = 2.44
email is 18% of the volume and 35.0% of the cost a 1.94x overweighting
chat is 74% of the volume and 58.9% of the cost a 0.80x underweighting
door 01A chat is not synchronous, whatever it looks like
An agent holds several chats at once, which is why the same minute of an agent’s day is
cheaper here than on the phone. It also means the nine minutes attributed to a chat are spread
across the whole conversation, and two people can be waiting in the gap between two messages.
The record is the strongest of the four because it is already text: nothing has to be transcribed
and nothing depends on memory. That is what makes the transcript the desk’s default
evidence.
door 02Email buys a written answer at 2.44 times the agent time
A written reply is read, drafted, checked and often approved before it goes out, and it has to
answer the question completely because nobody can ask a follow-up in the same thread window. On
this sample one email costs the same in agent time as two and a half chats.
It is also the channel with the strongest paper trail for anything that has to be quoted later,
which is the trade: more time, better evidence, and a reply that arrives in hours rather than
seconds.
door 03The phone is fast to a person and thin on paper
A phone contact is only 7.5 minutes, the shortest of the four, and it is the only one that cannot
be answered twice at once, so it is expensive in seats rather than in minutes. Its record is a
recording, kept for a shorter period than a transcript and read by a person rather than searched.
Social is the smallest channel and the one with a public half: a reply that everyone can read and
a private half that follows it. A public reply is the only part of any contact that a passer-by
sees.
Picking a door
Chat, when the answer is on the screen
Fastest route to a person inside its hours, cheapest for the desk, and the transcript is immediate evidence. Best for a state question: what the balance is, why a bonus is held, what a document is waiting on.
Email, when the answer has to be quoted
The channel to use when the reply itself is the point: a written decision, an amount, a date, or anything a later reader will have to see verbatim.
Phone, when the question is not yet clear
Useful when the problem has to be found before it can be answered, because a conversation can change direction in a way a message cannot.
- Decide what the answer needs to be: a state, a decision, or a record.
- Choose the channel whose record matches that need, not the one that answers fastest.
- Ask for the reference before asking for the outcome, so the answer is attached to a case.
- Get the amount and the date in writing, because those are what a later reader can check.
Measured against the same question. A single question in this sample costs 3.15 in a chat and 7.70 by email, and costs the desk nothing extra to be asked in both - except the second handling time. The comparison above is per contact at one rate, not a claim about which channel an operator prefers.
four queues chat and email agent minutes email to the second line one rate, four times