Planning for inbound telephone calls and other technology such as a predictive dialler is well understood. As customers elect to use multiple contact channels such as email, text messages and Twitter the planning task becomes more complex.

One of the common questions when planning a multichannel contact centre is “How can I work out my average speed to answer for emails, tweets, text messages..?”

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Task and contact blending in increases operational effectiveness allowing your teams to handle more contacts in any given period. But what do we mean by ‘blending’?

Call centre blending commonly means combining inbound and outbound telephone call activity – typically using ‘spare’ staff capacity to make outbound calls during periods of low inbound call demand. However blending is not just about combining inbound and outbound telephone calls – blending can also be used for combining telephone calls and other contact demands such as emails.

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