Alerts, Signals & Mitigation

To improve user focus and task efficiency, ASAPP elevates various alerts and signals within Live Insights.

These alerts notify users when performance is degrading, when events are detected, or when high queue mitigation measures can be activated based on volume.

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Type of Alerts

Live Insights displays four alert types:

1. Metric Highlighting: Highlights metrics that are above their target threshold within Live Insights. You can see the highlights on the Overview page, as well as within single queues and queue groups. The alert will persist until the metric’s performance returns below its threshold.
2. Event-based Alerts: Detects and records events per conversation and displays them in the conversation activity table.
3. High Queue Mitigation: Activates when the queue volume exceeds the target threshold. When active, you can use mitigation measures to reduce queue volume impacts.
4. High Effort Issue: Indicates when a high effort issue is awaiting assignment and is currently blocking other issues from being assigned.

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Metric Highlighting

Live Insights highlights metrics that are above their target threshold on the Overview page, as well as within single queues and queue groups.

The alert persists until the metric’s performance returns below its threshold.

Where metrics are highlighted:

1. Conversation performance: You can highlight both ‘average handle time’ and ‘average response time’.
2. Agent performance: ‘Time in status’, ‘average handle time’, and ‘average response time’.
3. Queue performance: You can highlight queue-level metrics within a single queue, queue groups, or on the Overview page.

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Event-based Alerts

Events are generated from actions taken by agents, customers or you.

Live Insights detects and records these events and displays them alongside conversation data, within the ‘alert’ column.

1. Conversation events: These events are related to a unique conversation. The events can be generated from agent actions or your actions.
   • Customer transfers: When an agent transfers a customer, Live Insights displays an alert next to the conversation.
   • Whisper sent: When you send a whisper message to an agent, Live Insights records and displays the event next to the conversation.
2. Agent events: These events impact the agent workload and help you contextualize agent performance. Live Insights displays the events for all targeted agents, within the Agent Performance panel.
   • High effort: Agents that are currently handling a high effort issue.
   • Flex concurrency: The agent is currently flexed and has a higher than normal utilization.

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High Queue Mitigation

ASAPP provides tools to enable workforce management groups to act fast when queues are or could be anomalously high.

Tools Overview

Live Insights can:

• Monitor queue volume for unusually high volume.
• Highlight ‘Queued’ metric based on severity level.
• Activate ‘Custom High Wait Time’ messaging and replace Estimated Wait Time messaging.
• Pause queues experiencing extremely high volume and prevent new queue assignments.

Volume Thresholds:

Live Insights highlights metrics when they reach past a threshold defined for the queue.

1. Low Severity: detects abnormal activity and has moderate impact on the queue.
2. High Severity: detects highly abnormal activity. The queue is severely impacted.

Mitigation Options:

Mitigation	Severity Threshold	Features available
Default behavior Business as usual. All queues are operating based on this setting.	None	Estimated Wait Time messaging is active. Routing & assignment rules remain unchanged.
Custom High Wait Time Message Low severity mitigation measure. Replaces Estimated Wait Time messaging.	Low Severity	Estimated Wait Time messaging is replaced with a custom message. Routing & assignment rules remain unchanged.
Pausing the Queue High severity mitigation measure. Prevents new assignments to the queue.	High Severity	Estimated Wait Time messaging is replaced with a custom message alerting users the queue is currently closed due to high volume. Assignment to the queue is paused. Users currently in the queue remain in the queue. To time out users waiting in the queue, please contact ASAPP.

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Activate Mitigation

1. Mitigation menu options: When available, Live Insights displays a menu on the relevant queue card in the Overview, as well as on the ‘Performance’ page of single queues and queue groups. To view those options, click the menu icon. The menu icon only displays when you highlight ‘Queued’.
2. Select mitigation: Based on the severity level, Live Insights displays different mitigation options. Select an option to activate it. To remove the mitigation behavior, select Default behavior.
3. Mitigation applied: When you select a mitigation option, it is indicated on the queue card or on the Performance page.

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High Effort Issues

ASAPP supports a capability to enable agent focus for higher effort issues, while maintaining efficiency.

This feature dynamically adjusts how many concurrent issues an agent should handle while assigned a high effort issue.

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What is a High Effort Issue

ASAPP will route customers based on the expected effort of their issue. All issues, by default, will have an effort of 1.

Any issue with an effort value greater than 1 will be considered “high effort”. Reach out to your ASAPP Implementation team to configure high effort rules for your program.

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Feature Definition

• Slot: A slot represents a space for a chat to be assigned to an agent. You can assign and configure multiple slots to a single agent via User Management.
• Effort: Effort represents what is needed from an agent to solve an issue. For each effort point assigned to an issue, an agent must have an equivalent number of available slots to be assigned that issue. ASAPP determines an issue’s effort by its relevant customer attributes.
• High Effort Time Threshold: A threshold that sets how much time an agent can parallelize a high effort issue with other issues. You can configure this threshold per queue. This threshold represents the duration of all existing assignments an agent is handling when a high effort issue is next in line.
• Flex Slot: All agents have 1 additional slot that can be used if they are eligible to receive a flex assignment or if they are temporarily over-effort when handling a high effort issue.
• Linear Utilization Level: A type of Linear Utilization relative to the number of assignments an agent has assigned at a given time, regardless of the assignment workload state.
• Assignment Workload: A measure of Linear Workload relative to the number of active assignments an agent has assigned at a given time. An assignment is not considered active if it has caused an agent to become Flex Eligible.
• Effort Workload: A measure of Linear Workload relative to the issue effort of all active assignments an agent has assigned at a given time.

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How are high effort issues prioritized and assigned?

ASAPP assigns high effort chats in the order that they entered the queue. You can prioritize high effort chats higher in the queue using customer attributes. This prioritization is optional and not required. A configurable high effort time threshold allows each queue to set how much time an agent can parallelize a high effort issue with other assignments.

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How are high effort issues assigned against other issues?

ASAPP assigns high effort issues in order of configured priority and when they entered the queue. An agent will receive a high effort assignment if they meet at least 1 of the following criteria:

• An agent has 0 active assignments.
• An agent has sufficient open slots to receive a high effort assignment.
• The high effort time threshold has elapsed for all of an agent’s current assignments and the high effort chat’s effort would not extend the agent’s Effort Workload past their Flex Slot.

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How do high effort issues impact performance?

• High effort issues will not change current behavior for Queue Priority.
• High effort issues will not change current behavior for Flex Eligibility or Flex Protect.
• High effort issues take longer to assign because they have to wait for an agent to have sufficient effort capacity.
• If a set of queues has 50% or more agents in common, then a high effort issue at the front of one queue will hold the issues in the other “shared” queues until it is assigned.

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How do I monitor the impact of high effort issues?

You can view the ‘Queued - High Effort’ metric in Live Insights on queue detail pages. This metric captures the number of high effort issues currently waiting in the queue. If a high effort issue is first in queue and slows other issues from being assigned, Live Insights displays an alert on this metric. These changes will also be visible for programs that do not have high effort rules configured.

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How can I tell which agents are handling high effort issues?

In the Agent Right Rail, you can monitor which agents are currently handling high effort issues. ASAPP displays an icon next to the agent’s utilization indicating a high effort issue is assigned. These changes will also be visible for programs that do not have high effort rules configured.