The difference between a customer service that struggles to meet SLAs and one that consistently exceeds them often lies not in the number of agents, but in how those agents are managed.
In the BPO industry, where each customer brings with it different traffic dynamics, specific skills, and KPIs to meet, operational flexibility is not a luxury-it is what distinguishes a provider capable of scaling up from one destined to lose margins.

This hypothetical case study, illustrates how the XCALLY Queue Manager solution has transformed the operational management of a contact center and is based on XCALLY’s experience in the field over the years.

Who is the customer

The client is a BPO operator based in Italy, specializing in providing customer care services for medium and large-sized companies operating in the utilities, e-commerce, telecommunications and financial services sectors. The company operates three operating offices distributed throughout Italy, with a workforce of more than 400 agents on 24-hour continuous shifts.

Operational complexity arises from the simultaneous management of 15 active contracts with customers from different industries, each with specific service requirements and stringent contractual KPIs. The contact center processes more than 180,000 interactions monthly through voice, email, chat and social media channels, with highly variable volumes based on individual customer business cycles.

Why the client contacted XCALLY

The contact center turned to XCALLY to solve a critical structural issue that was jeopardizing SLA compliance and contract profitability: the inability to nimbly redistribute agents among the queues of different customers served.

The traditional operating model involved fixed assignment of operators to specific customers for the entire duration of the shift. This rigidity generated obvious inefficiencies: when a customer went through a period of high seasonality or faced an emergency, agents assigned to other customers with low traffic remained underutilized, unable to intervene where they were needed.

The situation had become critical during the Christmas period of the previous year, when the e-commerce customer experienced a 380 percent surge in contact volume, while utilities and telecommunications customers showed traffic in the normal range.

Initial difficulties to overcome

The challenges the company faced reflected issues typical of the industry, amplified by multi-client management.

  • The first difficulty concerned the management of asymmetric traffic peaks. Different customers faced high moments at completely different times and for obviously different reasons (Black Friday and promotions or malfunctions and deadlines).
  • The second critical issue was the complexity of multi-client skills. Each contract required specific training: in-depth knowledge of products and services, familiarity with the proprietary CRM systems used, and specific technical skills.
  • The third issue concerned compliance with differentiated and often conflicting SLAs. Each contract had its own targets: maximum wait times ranging from 30 seconds to 3 minutes depending on the customer and the type of service, abandonment targets between 3 percent and 7 percent, agreed First Call Resolution levels between 70 percent and 85 percent, and differentiated availability time slots.
  • Finally, real-time cross-client visibility was completely lacking. Supervisors were viewing each customer’s metrics in separate dashboards, making it difficult to get an overview of critical issues and make quick resource reallocation decisions.

What services did it need and what goals did it have in mind

The company needed a technology solution that would meet specific operational needs while maintaining the highest standards of control and compliance required by customer contracts.

The priority was to implement a dynamic multi-customer queue management system, and it was essential to ensure a governance and access control system.
It also needed a unified multi-client dashboard that would show the real-time status of all managed queues, with immediate evidence of critical situations (at-risk SLAs, abnormal peaks, undersized queues).

 

 

Integration was a requirement: the solution had to connect seamlessly with XCALLY, already used for omnichannel interaction management, and integrate with the reporting platforms used for monitoring contractual SLAs.

The strategic goals were clear and measurable:

  • Maximize the utilization of human resources by eliminating downtime resulting from underutilized queues,
  • Ensure compliance with SLAs on all contracts even during sudden peaks or extraordinary events,
  • enhancing training investments by allowing multi-skilled agents to apply all their skills,
  • Reduce dependence on overtime hours to handle predictable peaks,
  • Improve operator satisfaction by offering greater autonomy and variety in daily work.

The solution implemented by XCALLY

XCALLY has implemented Queue Manager., a plugin installable on the XCALLY server that redefines queue management in complex multi-client environments while maintaining governance and control.

The key points of the project created

  • Queue architecture by customer and channel: a hierarchical structure was designed that organizes queues by customer, contact channel (voice, email, chat, social), and service type (technical support, administrative, commercial).
  • Competency and authorization framework: a system has been implemented that precisely maps the qualifications of each agent.
  • Agent dashboard with visual priorities: operators accessan intuitive and immediate interface that shows all accessible queues organized by customer.
  • Proactive notification system: an alert mechanism has been configured to automatically notify agents when a queue for which they are qualified enters a critical state.
  • Centralized supervisor control: team leaders and supervisors access a consolidated dashboard that provides comprehensive views of all operations. The view shows real-time distribution of agents by customer and queue, performance, and immediate action capability.
  • Native omnichannel integration: Queue Manager has been fully integrated with XCALLY, ensuring that dynamic queue management works uniformly across all managed contact channels.
  • Advanced reporting for analysis and optimization: a comprehensive suite of reports has been implemented that tracks resource utilization by customer, by agent, and by time slot and SLA compliance.

This data enables an ongoing optimization process, identifying recurring traffic patterns, opportunities for improvement in training, and the need for adjustments in access rule configuration.

The results obtained

The implementation of XCALLY Queue Manager generated significant and measurable results for the BPO operator, confirming the strategic value of the solution in complex multi-client contexts.

  • Optimization of human resource utilization: in the first six months after implementation, data analysis showed a 31% increase in the effective utilization rate of agents. This optimization translated into the ability to handle the same volume of interactions with a 15 percent smaller workforce, allowing the operator to absorb new contracts without proportionally increasing headcount.
  • Improvement in compliance with contractual SLAs: SLA compliance rate on waiting times increased from 83% to 97% on all managed contracts. Particularly significant improvement on customers with volatile traffic: SLA violations during sudden spikes decreased by 81%, thanks to the ability to quickly mobilize qualified agents from less congested queues.
  • Significant reduction in operating costs: Operational flexibility resulted in a 47% reduction in theuse of overtime hours to handle traffic peaks. In addition, the elimination of SLA violation penalties has contributed substantially to improved operating margins on contracts.
  • Improved agent satisfaction and retention: Agents particularly appreciate the increased operational autonomy (68 percent positive feedback), the variety of activities managed that reduces monotony (61 percent), and the ability to intervene where they feel most useful (54 percent).
  • Strengthening competitive positioning: The operational flexibility provided by Queue Manager has become a central element in business proposals to potential new customers.
  • Improved customer experience of end customers: The positive impact extended beyond operational metrics to end customers served. The average Net Promoter Score calculated on managed contacts increased by 12 points, with particularly significant improvements in time slots that previously experienced critical service issues.

 

 

Conclusion

This summary case study, based on data from multiple customers managed over the years, demonstrates how XCALLY Queue Manager represents a practical and technologically advanced answer to the specific operational challenges of the BPO industry, where multi-client management requires operational flexibility without compromising on governance and control.

The success of the project highlights a fundamental principle for the BPO industry: operational efficiency in multi-client environments comes not from adding resources, but fromintelligently optimizing existing ones. Queue Manager enables this optimization through technology that simplifies complexity instead of adding to it.

The scalability of the XCALLY solution makes this approach replicable in BPO call centers of any size and complexity.