What is blended resourcing?
Blended resourcing is a way of staffing a contact centre so that people are not locked to a single stream of work. Instead of a fixed team that only answers one queue, agents are trained across several queues, channels or clients and drawn from a shared pool as demand rises and falls.
The term is used in two related ways:
- Blended agents (the traditional meaning). In many call centres, “blending” means agents handle both inbound and outbound work. When inbound calls are quiet, the dialler gives them outbound calls; when inbound volume climbs, they switch back. Many centres extend this to channels, with agents moving between calls, email and webchat.
- Blended resourcing across clients. In an outsourced contact centre, agents are trained on several client accounts and shared between them. Capacity moves to whichever client needs it, which is the model Telnet uses.
Both versions solve the same problem: customer demand is uneven, but a dedicated roster is fixed.
Why dedicated teams are expensive
Contact centre demand rarely arrives smoothly. It peaks on Monday mornings, after a bill run, after a storm, or when a system fails. A team sized for the peak sits partly idle the rest of the time. A team sized for the average falls behind at the peak, so service level and abandonment rate suffer.
Workforce management and Erlang C help you find the best compromise, but they can’t remove it. Small teams are hit hardest: a queue with only a handful of agents needs a much bigger buffer, proportionally, to hit the same service level than a large pool does. That’s the economics of pooling. The bigger and more flexible the pool, the more efficiently it can absorb random variation in calls.
In a dedicated model you pay for every rostered hour, whether the phone rings or not. Idle time, shrinkage and the buffer you carry for peaks all end up in your cost per contact.
How blended resourcing works
A well-run blended model has a few building blocks:
- Cross-trained agents. Agents are trained on more than one queue or client, with clear accreditation for each so nobody takes calls they aren’t ready for.
- Routing that knows who can do what. Skills-based routing sends each contact to an available agent with the right skills, and priority rules protect urgent work such as hazard calls.
- Context on screen. When an agent may switch accounts between calls, the platform has to show the right customer record, script and knowledge base for each interaction automatically.
- Per-client measurement. Quality assurance, handle times and satisfaction are reported per client, so sharing agents never hides a problem on one account.
The result is higher, steadier agent occupancy without overloading people, and spare capacity that can be pointed at a spike within minutes.
Blended resourcing and pricing
Because agents are shared, an outsourced provider using blended resourcing doesn’t need to bill you for a fixed number of seats. Many charge per interaction instead: you pay for the calls, emails and chats actually handled. That shifts the risk of idle time from you to the provider, and it makes overflow call handling and surge capacity affordable, because cover that is rarely used costs little until it’s needed.
When a dedicated team still makes sense
Blending isn’t right for every workload. Very specialised work, such as complex technical support or regulated advice, may justify a dedicated team, and some organisations combine both: a small core team for specialist contacts, with blended agents covering overflow, after-hours and peaks.