Call Center Management Featured Article
Looking Into the Future with Call Center Management
Everyone would have the potential to be a great manager in a business setting if business always went as predicted. If sales projections could be exact, companies wouldn’t under- or over-allocate resources and not waste money. If contact center call volume was always precisely what the day’s schedule estimated it should be, being a call center manager would be the easiest job in the world.
Now that we’re done with fairy tales, it’s time to face reality. The mark of a great manager is someone who can manage while even under pressure to handle unexpected outcomes. In a sales environment, this might mean hitting goals despite uncommonly high sales turnover, or the spectacular efforts of a competitor. In the call center, it means ensuring that call quality remains high even when a bad head cold tears through the call center, dropping agents like flies.
In reality, it’s about making educated guesses and playing with “what-if” scenarios, according to Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“Of course we can’t see into the future,” wrote Ciarlo. “But sometimes making an educated guess at future events is an important part of the contact center manager’s job. The crucial functions of forecasting and scheduling can help to eliminate uncertainty, by using available intelligence to predict the resources that will be necessary for customer volume.”
In many cases, it’s about collecting and collating as much data as possible. Everything can affect call volume, from the weather to a social media trend to a sales promotion to current events to the actions of competitors. The more information managers have – and the better use they make of it – the better they can make educated guesses and “see” into the future. Examining the past is also very critical, as historical information can help provide a more accurate peek into future call volume. Workforce management is the tool these managers can use to help make their educated guesses, wrote Ciarlo.
“Whether a contact center experiences relatively steady calling patterns or frequent periods of uncertainty, a workforce optimization solution is the key component of forecasting future call volume,” he wrote. “The access it provides to historical call history can help managers navigate the scheduling challenges posed by seasonal promotions, special offers and new, aggressive marketing tactics.”
While the call center may not have precisely what it needs at the precise configuration that was forecast, in the case of unexpected call volume, a good workforce management solution can make the best out of existing resources.
“A workforce management solution can also employ skill teams (skill sets, or skill groups) based on each agent’s capabilities to handle certain skills/queues/competencies,” wrote Ciarlo. “This allows the forecast process to select the best skills combinations for either blank shifts to be filled later, or to place existing agents. It’s another way to plan ahead for whatever the next shift or day brings.”
For most organizations, the contact center is simply too complex a place to manage manually today (and succeed at supporting customers properly). Throw in unexpected curve balls, and it’s apparent that today’s customer support function requires a complex tool such as workforce management that can look both into the future and the past.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi