Hot Desking Administration

What is Hot Desking?

In its standard configuration, On-Demand Call Center Platform associates an Agent's incoming phone number (DID) with the Agent's login profile. This allows an Agent to sign in to On-Demand Call Center Platform from home (or wherever their telephone is located) and receive calls. This is convenient for a distributed or home-based workforce, but not so convenient for traditional "brick and mortar" call center facilities, where Agents may sit at a different workstation everyday. On-Demand Call Center Platform's Hot Desking feature meets this latter need by tying a phone number directly to a logical workstation. Agents sign in to Chat, then select the workstation they want to use. This enables your workforce to take calls from any physical location in your facility.

In addition, Hot Desking provides phone number redundancy. Redundancy allows you to specify an alternate or backup telephone number for each workstation in your facility. In the event that some problem affects a workstation's primary phone number, you can easily switch to the backup number. This feature is most useful if the primary and backup telephone numbers are provided by separate telecommunications carriers.

Enabling Hot Desking

Before you can use the Hot Desking feature, it must be enabled. Only Call Center Staff can do this.

Figure 18-1: Edit Call Center Menu

• Select the Configure menu, then click Edit Call Center

• Locate the Hot Desking Mode: field and set it to the desired value:

• 0=disabled
• 1=admin-defined
• 2=agent self-service

Admin-defined means that the Call Center administrator is responisible for configuring the workstation list and providing the phone numbers for each. Agent self-service allows the Agent to provide their own configuration information.

• Agent self-service is not available yet.

Enabling Phone Number Redundancy

To enable the telephone number redundancy feature:

• Select the Configure menu, then click Edit Call Center.
• Locate the the Redundancy: field and set it to "1".

• Only Call Center Staff can modify this setting.

 Hot Desking Administration

Figure 18-2: Hot Desking Menu

To administer Hot Desking, select the Configure menu, then click Workstation List (located under the Hot Desking label). This brings up the administrative interface screen (figure 4-6). The Workstation List is composed of three sections:

• The Search Bar
• The Tool Button Bar
• The Workstation List

Using this interface, you can accomplish the following tasks:

• View the list of existing workstations
• Edit workstation configurations
• Find a specific workstation or set of workstations
• Add a new workstation
• Upload a list of workstations
• Export your workstation list
• Switch between Primary and Backup phone numbers
• Release workstations that have been locked by the system

 The Workstation List

The workstation list gives you an overview of all of your Agent workstations. You can see which stations are available and which are in use, which have backup numbers assigned and what the assigned primary and backup numbers are. If you have more workstations in your calll center than will fit easily on one screen, the list is split between multiple screens. Use the page links at the bottom and top of the screen to move between pages.

Figure 18-3: Workstations List

• The Workstation List page is not dynamic: it does not automatically update as the state of your workstations changes. If you want to keep tabs on workstation usage, you must either reload the page from the On-Demand Call Center Platform menus, or perform a search or filter operation (Search is described below).

 Editing an Existing Workstation

Use the Edit Workstations link in the Actions column of the Workstation List to modify or delete an existing workstation. Each workstation is defined by the following fields:

Table 18-1: Workstation Field Descriptions

Use the Delete button (located next to the Save Changes button) to permanently (and irrevocably) remove a workstation.

Searching for a Workstation

Use the Search bar tools to find a specific workstation or to filter your workstation list to selected stations. Like all other On-Demand Call Center Platform search widgets, the workstation search feature is a "type ahead" search widget: start typing the first few letters of the workstation name you want to find, and the list will filter itself to match your search. If the list is empty, no workstation names match your entry.

You can also filter the list by Workstation Status or Number in Use by selecting an entry from the drop down lists to the right of the search widget.

 Adding a Workstation

Click the Add a Workstation button to display the Workstation Details page. Enter the workstation information using this form (the fields are described in the Edit an Existing Workstation section above).

Figure 18-4: Adding a Workstation

Uploading Workstations

Use the Upload Workstations tool to add many workstations at a time. You have two options for uploading: File Upload and Text Upload.

Figure 18-5: File Upload

File Upload takes a file from your local hard disk and inserts its contents into your database of workstations. Your upload file must meet the following requirements:

• The file must be a plain text file of comma separated values (csv).

• The first row in your file must contain the following column headers. These headers must entered exactly as shown, including case:
  • Workstation—The name of each workstation
  • Primary Number—The main number for each workstation

You may also include the following optional column headers:

• Backup Number—The alternate phone number (if any)
• Description

Your upload data must conform to the requirements described in the Edit an Existing Workstation section above. You can upload a maximum of 500 rows and a total file size of 1 MB. If you need to upload more rows or a larger data set, split your data into multiple files. If any of these conditions are not met, you will receive an error message telling you what the problem is.

Text Upload can be used to type or paste data into a text area. The same rules apply to your data here as in File Upload.

Figure 18-6: Text Upload

When creating your upload file, separate each column of data with a comma. If your data contains a comma (for example, in the Description field) enclose the entire column's data in quotes, as in the example below:

Example Upload File

Workstation,Primary Number,Backup Number,Description 

station 1,18005551010,18665551010,here is a short description with no comma

station 2,18005551011,,"here is a long description, it has a comma in the data"

Handling Conflicts

Each row in your upload file must have unique values for Workstation, Primary Number, and Backup Number. In other words, no two rows can duplicate a workstation name, primary or backup phone number. You will get an error message if your upload file repeats any of these values.

You can use either File Upload and Text Upload to update existing Workstations in your database. Hot Desking gives you two choices for for handling entries that would modify an existing record in the database. When the Show me conflicts before completion radio button is selected, you will see an error message if you attempt to upload a record that matches an existing workstation name but contains a different primary or backup phone number. When this error occurs, none of your uploaded entries will be saved, leaving your existing workstation list unchanged. When Overwrite conflicts without prompting is selected, modifications to your existing database will be written and saved without any warning.

• If you change a workstation's phone numbers while that workstation is in use, the change will not be applied until the Agent signs out of Chat and signs back in again.

Exporting your Workstation List

Click the Export to Text button in the Toolbar to save your list of workstations to a comma separated values text file. You can then open the resulting file in your favorite spreadsheet program or other workforce management tool.

Switching Between Primary and Backup Phone Numbers

If your On-Demand Call Center Platform has the Phone Number Redundancy feature enabled, you can switch between primary and backup numbers in the event that one number becomes unusable.

• If your On-Demand Call Center Platform does not have the Phone Number Redundancy feature enabled, you won't see the Switch Number in Use button on the toolbar.

Figure 18-7: Switching Phone Numbers

Click the Switch Number in Use button on the toolbar to change the phone number used by selected workstations. You select the workstations you want by checking the check box to the left of the workstation name. The Switching Numbers of Selected Workstations dialog prompts you to set all the selected workstations to either the Primary or Backup phone numbers.

• Checking the topmost checkbox in the Workstation List selects all records on the page. You can combine the Search and Filter functions described above to pare down the workstation list.

• Switching to a number already in use has no effect.

Releasing Workstations

Figure 18-8: Releasing Workstations

Click the Release Workstations button to make available workstations that are locked by the system. Specify which workstations to release by checking their checkboxes first.

Normally, a workstation is released and made available for use when an Agent signs out of Chat. However, if the Agent closes the Chat window without using the Sign Out link, the workstation may remained locked and assigned to that Agent for some period of time (approximately five minutes if everything is functioning smoothly). If another Agent wants to use that workstation before it is released automatically, you can manually release it using the Release Workstation tool.