Have you ever call into a customer service function, been answered with "all of our Agents are currently busy with other customers, please wait and the next available customer service representative will be right with you" and then waited and waited and waited.   It probably crossed your mind that maybe they all went home!   Is it possible that a call center could queue a caller for service when nobody is actually logged in to handle the call?   Well, the answer is absolutely yes!   A bit of careless script writing and you will find that customers are queueing for Agents that went home hours ago! Influencing the call flow within your Contact Center, based on the dynamics of your environment,  is an essential part of call center management.   The dynamics of your call center are changing by the minute.  More callers are entering the queue; call holding time is increasing; the position of callers within the queue is changing and the priority of the caller is also changing.   We have Platinum,  Gold, Silver and Bronze (Yes Virginia, all customers are not create equal) and we handle them differently!  How do we estimate holding time?   Do we even know if someone is logged in?   That is the stuff of call flow scripting using real time reporting data! ShoreTel has an entity in their ECC Scripting tool called a "service".  One of the elements of the service is "Agents Logged Out" call handling.   It is a great solution, but it is an all or nothing binary solution.  (There are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don’t).   If anyone is logged in, the service continues to define the call handling strategy.    What happens if I want to handle callers base don the absolute number of agents logged in?  Maybe it is not a smart idea to handle callers the same way given that there is only one Agent logged in rather than an army of 20 Agents.    We are going to need a more sophisticated filter to handle callers based on this dynamic. The CISCO UCCX Script Editor has an amazing library of Java Beans that can be used to find out not only if an Agent is logged in, but how many are logged in!   Now that is a level of flexibility that can make your call flow really intelligent.   In this video clip we take a look at the very powerful "get statistics" icon within the CISCO UCCX scripting error.   We can use this icon to participate in the real time data stream that defines the dynamics of our call center.  We can tap the number of callers in queue, the number of agents available, the average call holding time and even handle a caller based on the fact that they have become the oldest call in queue.   The UCCX Scripting editor in the hands of a talented programmer can add a "knowledge" based routing component to your call flow!   Intelligent Call Management indeed! http://youtu.be/ztXef20woeY