Call Center Management Featured Article
Improve Forecasting for Better Call Center Management
Have you ever tried to staff your call center without properly forecasting for call volume? It’s a challenging task and one that is sure to lead to errors, unhappy employees and frustrated customers. Call center management is all about proper processes, including those involved with your scheduling activities.
Monet Software recently published a blog on this topic, pointing to the importance of accurately forecasting for the call center. The reality is that accurate forecasts create accurate schedules and automating the process in a workforce management solution delivering historical data makes sense. When this argument isn’t solid enough to influence decisions, it’s time to look at a few other key points:
Historical Data over Time
It’s one thing to base your scheduling on what happened last week or this week last year. But, are there things happening lately that contribute to call volume that need to be considered in your scheduling? When you can pull data over several weeks or months, you can get a better picture over time and produce better schedules.
Get Granular
Call center management tends to flourish in environments where there is a lot of information from which to build decisions. Taking it to the next level means you drill down into the details. With a workforce management solution, you can edit call volumes according to intervals and queues to make more informed decisions.
Override Automation
While the automation feature within the workforce management solution is valuable, it doesn’t have the knowledge of call center management in all cases. There are points where you need to be able to override the number of required agents or adjust agents based on campaigns or other information.
Total Day Adjustments
There will be times when you need to apply more sweeping changes to call totals, AHT, service levels, staffing numbers and abandoned targets. Workforce management allows for this in real-time.
Forecast Editing
Your forecast is an important tool, but it needs to match the current trends of data collected for the day. The intra-day functionality allows you to make the necessary edits so your agents can stay on track.
Such adjustments are critical if call center management wants to ensure properly forecasting and scheduling. It’s the best way to avoid unnecessary complications in the call center, while also keeping costs under control. If you haven’t looked to automation, now’s a great time to explore your options.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi