Call Center Management Feature Article

September 09, 2011

Staying Sane in the Schedule-Centric Call Center Labyrinth

By Linda Dobel, TMCnet Contributor

Unless you live in a third-world country, there’s a pretty god chance your life revolves around a schedule. And it’s not just your life that’s scheduled, it’s also your kids school lives and extra-curricular activities, it’s every mode of public transportation, its what’s broadcast on TV, and heck, it’s even when political parties can hold their debates or when the U.S. President can address a speech to Congress and the nation that march to the beat of some carefully determined schedule. Yet, of all of the aspects of life that are affected by scheduling, the call center is arguably among the most schedule-centric areas there is.

Thankfully, unlike the early days when the first call centers came into vogue as a way to market and provide customer care, today’s contact center management can rely on workforce management software to aid in the myriad gyrations necessary to establish workforce schedules that take into account all of the variables that affect the contact center and its team members, like the time of day, the agent skill sets available and necessary, volume peaks and troughs, and plain old business fluctuations.

Still, even with workforce management software  it takes a certain amount of managerial intellect and insight to set up call center schedules that will accommodate all of the variables that may potentially affect the predicted workday or evening in the call center.

While every good call center manager has his or her own ‘secrets’ for essentially attempting to predict the future and establish workforce schedules that hopefully keep the operation on track, there are also some proven tips that workforce management software expert Monet Software has complied and presented in a blog that are worth adding to the bag of tricks, so to speak. 

One of the tips is to not overlook the unexpected or as Monet Software put it, the “what if” scenarios and exceptions to the normal routine, which the software company refers to as “special days.” In its examples it advocates using historical data as the basis of all schedules and then making plans to make adjustments for “what ifs” like internal corporate changes such as new marketing campaigns or external factors like the weather. The same should be done for events that occur during the month, like a holiday such as Labor Day or Thanksgiving.

Monet Software also places a strong emphasis on making intraday updates and recalculations to the workforce schedules and making adjustments accordingly. For instance, it says once recalculations are made things likes training and breaks will need to be moved around. More important beyond the immediate changes, it suggests that the cause for the interruption to the planned schedule be examined so it can be used when building future schedules.

One more tip from Monet Software is for those contact centers that employ multiple means of customer communication such as e-mail, chat and twitter. In these cases, historical data is helpful to have, but it is also important to look at the urgency and volume of the communication coming from these electronic channels as well as telephone traffic. As far as how to have agents handle multiple channels of communication, Monet warns against taking a “universal” approach where agents are assigned to handle all forms of communication as the work comes in because it says this can easily lead to agent burnout. Instead, it suggests considering the “banded work” approach where agents are assigned to blocks of time to handle a new communication venue.

Overall, while Monet admits that workforce scheduling is a challenging task, it stresses that it is critical to the success of the contact center’s endeavors. Hopefully these tips will make it easier.

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