Q: How do I more effectively cover holidays in my call center?
Today, as the telecommunications administrator, it is my responsibility to close the call center on the holiday and reopen it on the next business day. Even though I can do this remotely, it requires that I remain with in dial up access during the business hours of the call center at holiday times. This often times interrupts my vacation or time away during the holidays.

A: There are a couple options available to automate holiday coverage and relieve you of the responsibility. The first and most efficient option would be to use Holiday Routing Tables in the switch. Beginning with Definity release 9.1, AVAYA began to offer Holiday routing tables. To check to see if you have this feature available to use, go to customer options and look for the “Vectoring (Holidays)?” field. If this field is stroked with a “Y” you will be able to use this feature. There are 10 tables with 15 fields each. In order to administer a new table, enter the command “change holiday-table x (where x = 1-10 of the holiday table you are administering). You may use individual days or ranges. The month and day are required fields; and if an hour is entered a minute must also be entered. Additionally, there is no validation to verify the consistency between 15 holidays in a table and date ranges can overlap therefore multiple entries of the same holiday can exist in the same table. The processing in a table is checked from top to bottom, and checking is stopped when the first match is found. If a holiday range spans the year end (December 31-January 01), two entries must be made. There is validation that the day of the month is valid for the given month. Now that you have the tables populated, simply go to the vector where your time of day is being checked and insert after your time of day steps the appropriate command. There are two options, “goto step/vector x if holiday in table y” (where x = the announcement giving callers notification of closure for the holidays and y = the table where the list of holidays exists) or “goto step/vector x if holiday not-in table y.

If you don’t have availability to use holiday vectoring, you may choose to cover holidays with a holiday hunt group. Simply create a new hunt group called Holiday. You must create at least one member or log-in ID. Again, go to the vector where the time of day is being administered, and insert the appropriate command. We usually use “goto step x if staffed agents in split/skill y > 0 (where x = the announcement giving callers notification of closure for the holidays and y = the new hunt group created called holiday). To activate holiday coverage simply have the supervisor or manager log in with the new log-in ID associated with your new hunt group. Once the holiday is over, simply log this same ID out. This puts the responsibility of holiday closure on the call center staff and relieves telecommunications of this responsibility.

I hope you found these options useful and helpful in your quest to be relieved of some of the responsibility to open and close your call center during times of holiday. Keep in mind, these processes may be used for other purposes of closure and not just holidays. Be creative, and think about other areas where you can use this functionality to make your life as the administrator in the call center survivable.

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