Call Center Management Featured Article
What Two Things Can Reduce Call Center Costs by 20 Percent?
The call center is the necessary evil of any customer-facing company. You want to be able to deliver according to customer expectations, but you don’t want the cost associated with supporting agents, a PBX (News - Alert), call center software and more. At the end of the day, however, you can’t get around the importance of the customer interaction on the phone, supported through the call center.
Fortunately, there are ways call center management can reduce the overall cost of operation. It entails paying attention to the details and putting the right solutions in place to ensure efficiency and productivity. For instance, if you’re operating a 10-seat call center and still relying on the spreadsheet for scheduling because you think your operation is still small enough, you’re wasting money and time.
Call center management solutions provider, Monet Software, recently posted a blog on how you can cut costs by 20 percent in just two easy steps. Let’s take a look at what they have to say about cost burdens in the call center and what you can do to improve your environment. Just a warning – both of their steps have to do with trashing the spreadsheet.
Something important to know – your biggest cost savings are realized when your agents adhere to the schedule and their daily rituals are optimized. What can you do with both of these elements to see your costs go down and your overall performance improve?
Schedule Adherence – you’ve probably already experienced the limited spot-checking capabilities of the spreadsheet. You can’t monitor adherence in real-time, which means you’ve likely experienced missed service levels and wasted resources. Workforce management software helps you realize real-time monitoring and adherence so you can restore service levels to projected heights and reduce shrinkage by as much as 15 minutes per agent per day.
Optimized Downtime – your overall costs and productivity are greatly impacted by how well managers schedule lunches and approve breaks. How well your agents adhere to the time allowed for these activities also has an impact. With proven workforce management solutions, the shrinkage rates associated with these activities can fall between 20 percent and 35 percent, depending on the size of the business. When these rates fall, you experience an almost instant increase in productivity and profits.
By paying attention to these two elements, call center management can drive savings within the average call center to as high as 20 percent. This benefit alone is reason enough to trash the spreadsheet and check out available workforce management solutions.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi