Call Center Management Featured Article
Real-Time Monitoring Enables Proactive, Rather Than Reactive, Call Center Scheduling and Management
Once upon a time, most of a call center manager’s day was spent walking the aisles, listening in on conversations (one side of them, anyway) and doling out advice. On rare occasions, a manager might “plug in” to an agent call and listen to both sides of the conversation. With time at a premium, however, this practice was generally reserved only for training or evaluation sessions.
While it’s impractical to imagine that a manager could monitor every call in the contact center, technology has opened up a number of new options for managers and supervisors. Virtual monitoring technologies are plentiful today, and they can help managers ensure that customer support standards are being upheld, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“It’s one of the contact center manager’s most important responsibilities – knowing what each agent is doing at any given time during the workday,” he wrote. “Of course, one person cannot be everywhere, but technology makes it possible to monitor agent activity without ever leaving one’s desk.”
For every state-of-the art contact center solution today, there are monitoring and reporting functions that, when used properly, can help the manager attain a picture of the current health of the contact center at a glance. Most importantly, it helps the manager ensure that the call center’s carefully prepared schedule is being adhered to.
Solutions such as Monet’s Monet Metrics deliver the information managers need to stay on schedule and keep quality high in real-time, rather than at the end of the shift or the end of the day, as with more traditional solutions. Armed with this real-time information, says Ciarlo, managers can react more quickly and correct adherence issues before they impact customer service or throw the schedule out of alignment.
Some of the metrics that can be tracked by managers in real time include service levels,, answer and abandon metrics, average handle time (AHT), average speed of answer (ASA), average talk time (ATT), forecast accuracy, labor costs and staffing and shrinkage and absenteeism. Together with an intelligently prepared schedule, having these metrics in real-time at a glance can ensure that managers aren’t taken by surprise when problems or roadblocks arise.
“Proactive performance management takes the guesswork out of knowing what your agents are doing, and how well they are doing it,” writes Ciarlo.
Because in the contact center, no one likes unpleasant surprises, and it’s a danger to the health of the business when customers learn about problems and delays before the contact center manager becomes aware of them.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi