Glossary

What is Busy hour?

What is a busy hour in telecommunication?

A busy hour in telecommunication refers to the total number of customer calls carrying out call center services during the peak or busy hour of the B2B call center.

The peak busy hour in telecommunication is defined as the peak one-hour period during the day when the largest volume of subscriber traffic (in terms of CPU, memory utilization, or IOPS) is handled by top call center outsourcing companies.

It is an uninterrupted period of 60 minutes for which the average intensity of busy hour traffic is maximum. It is said as the busiest hour of the busiest day of the normal week, excluding holidays, weekends, and special events.

The 60 minutes act as a chance of enhancing the digital image with online reputation management with continuous support with technical implementations of chatbot and other AI-based services, for effortless go. Now, that you have a clear understanding of what is a busy hour in telecommunication, you can implement modern technologies and ideas for the improvement of services during that time duration.

Here are a few tips you can implement in order to effectively manage the busy hour in telecommunication at your call center:

1) Plan in advance

It is vital that your call center agents are aware of the busy hour traffic. As managers mostly keep a track of the peak hours in a call center set up, it is their duty to inform their agents of the same. If the agents have information of which hour constitutes busy hour, they will be prepared for it and will not be taken aback when the volume of incoming calls starts to peak.

In order to identify the busy hour traffic correctly, call centers should analyse the call volume on an hourly basis for the last few months and identify the hour when this volume surges. Once they have an idea of the past trends, they can accurately forecast the busy hours for the days to come. Managers can, accordingly, recruit additional agents to help if and when required.

2) Upload Self-help Videos on your Website

Your customers can have complex queries that they want answers to. If your company has a website offering online service, count on multi-media to resolve such queries.

For example, you can upload brief videos on your site that offer answers to issues many of your customers commonly face. This will do away with the need for making a call and the volume of calls during the busy hour traffic will automatically go down. The call centers of some of the well-known companies use this approach in order to provide their customers with hassle-free support.

3) Automate all Manual Tasks

To handle the sudden spike in incoming calls, managers need to make sure that their agents have all the relevant information on their personal computers, so that they can view the details related to any caller merely by touching a few buttons and do not need to switch between screens in order to view and edit duplicate or inaccurate customer details when taking a call. If you are able to automate manual tasks, you can streamline call handling to a significant degree.

4) Update Status Message for Calls on IVR

Your customers should be provided with information regarding the time they should connect with a call center agent when their calls are placed in a queue. The IVR should redirect these calls to a self-help service on your website. During busy hour in telecommunication, it is possible that the waiting time for a call may exceed over a minute. In such a scenario, the IVR should redirect any such calls to the ‘not-so-busy’ hours of the day.

5) Take Customer Feedback into Account

Taking customer feedback into account is essential for any kind of organisation and a call center stands as no exception. In order to bring down the call duration, the agents can question some of the callers on how they can accomplish the same. While all the callers may not respond to these questions, some of them definitely will. Even if the agents are able to save a minute or two on some of these calls, they will able to manage the rest of the calls in an efficient manner.