Call Center Management Featured Article
Forecasting Critical to Call Center Management
Properly scheduling a call center challenges managers with balancing the number of agents at their disposal with how many they’ll actually need when the phones start to ring. Doing this accurately would be a lot easier if you could see how many customers were actually going to call. Unfortunately without either ESP or time travel technology, seeing the future is a pretty difficult thing to achieve. Staffing challenges are however a lot easier to manage when you utilize a forecasting system that can help you make educated guesses about your staff requirement. This kind of software may not be as immediately impressive as a Delorean outfitted with a flux capacitor, but it’s still pretty helpful in the call center space.
Forecasting is critical to the operation of your call centers and without it, poor planning and execution of schedules will quickly impact both revenue and customer satisfaction. Plus, let’s not forget the employees, overburdening them can quickly cause burnout and increase turnover rates. Even if you’re not using a forecasting solution already, workforce management provider Monet Software offers a number of tips designed to get call centers a better idea of what to expect when scheduling.
First the company suggests that you take time to collect call history data, seeing where you’ve been is also a great way to see where you’re going so having this information ready can act as a road map for success.
The next portion of effective scheduling is to define the staff needs. By seeing where you came up against heavy volume and where there were lulls, you can effectively schedule to fit the needs of historical trends. Scheduling for 15 to 30 minute increments allows your staff more fluidity and can be used to fill gaps in coverage should unexpected fluctuations of call volume occur.
Actively monitoring your agents allows you to make corrections to scheduling needs in real-time, allowing you to optimize as you go.
Forecasting is one way that call centers can effectively plan for the future. For more information visit the Monet Blog.
Chris DiMarco is a Managing 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