Call Center Management Featured Article
What is Effective Call Center Management?
The challenges of managing a call center are immediately apparent to anyone who’s ever been involved with a customer service operation. Technology challenges withstanding, the most obvious task of management is to organize and utilize agents in such a way that the highest levels of satisfaction are always maintained. A staff that’s being managed competently is likely to be happier, and happiness is directly related to the satisfaction of customers. Successful staffing and scheduling is a combination of collecting key performance indicators and working to schedule within the needs of your workforce.
Monitoring abandonment rates, call volumes and seasonal influxes is the first step to proper call center management. While it was at one point incumbent on a manager to keep track of all of these things, software that automatically handles this is now a staple in most call centers.
Workforce management software for example, offers call centers actionable intelligent to prepare staff levels on a daily basis. Generally workforce management suites are used instead of standard spreadsheet style scheduling and can offer a more detailed and comprehensive look at your staffing expectations for a given day. By efficiently managing your workforce you can curb issues like shrinkage, over staffing and schedule adherence all of major concern in the call center, where staffing is usually the number one cost associated with the operation.
Above anything else, workforce management software gives a more reliable top-down view of staff requirements as they relate to the expected call volume. By analyzing historical information, duration of customer contact, expected seasonal peaks and staff schedules, Workforce management software can quickly balance how many agents you have vs. how many you’ll need. Some workforce management suites even offer CRM integration, routing to a preferred agent each and every time and continuing a productive dialog to that fosters customer retention. Workforce management products also allow you to monitor agent adherence levels and determine which skills are in demand in your call center.
Though it’s not the only way to do so, workforce management solutions are the first step to removing some of the confusion surrounding staff efficiency. Intelligent forecasting makes it easier for call center managers to schedule accordingly by incorporating a workforce management solution in you call center.
Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. Follow him on Twitter (News - Alert) @cpdimarco.
Edited by Jamie Epstein