Call Center Management Featured Article
Learning the Workforce Management and Scheduling Lessons from the Holiday Contact Center Rush
So the holidays are over, and your contact center is settling down into business as usual, right? Seasonal employees are packing up and ready to leave, customers have returned everything they don’t want or don’t need for exchanges or credits and have taken a vow of “no spending” at least until springtime. It’s going to become quiet, and the holiday rush is nothing but a stressful memory.
While you may be glad to see the back of the holiday anxiety, it shouldn’t be an excuse to forget. Chances are good that lessons were learned and opportunities identified during the busy holiday rush, particularly when it comes to workforce management, according to Lisa Disselkamp writing for Deloitte’s HR Times blog.
“While some of the increased stresses businesses and employees experience can be chalked up to the end-of-year holiday rush, they are often accentuated examples of shortcomings that plague workforce management systems year-round,” she wrote.
Consider making a list of everything that went wrong during the holidays, and venturing to identify the reasons for the problems. Were workers calling out sick because of excess holiday frivolity or family demands? Were temp employees under-trained and taking longer to handle calls than expected? Were customers reporting poor service and calling back repeatedly to resolve the same issues? Were workers duplicating efforts because of poorly integrated systems or channels? Was there a shortage of workers with certain skills? How did you handle workers’ requests for overtime, and was it effective?
Chances are good that all these issues can be handled properly with a good workforce management solution, and this solution could even help managers answer these questions and evaluate performance from a system wide perspective down to an individual agent’s performance.
In other cases, wrote Disselkamp, the problems can be solved with better training of agents across more channels, products and services, or new skills.
“Particularly at busy times, having employees with the ability to cover for one another can be an invaluable scheduling aid and method for managing labor budgets,” she wrote. “Cross-training gives employees the flexibility to do different jobs while they’re on duty, rather than having to, say, call in someone from home to cover or work overtime during an especially busy time or when an unexpected staffing shortage occurs.”
With a good pool of crossed-trained agents and an effective workforce management and scheduling tool that allows for changes down to 15 minute intervals, contact center managers can be sure they’re never left stranded with too few skilled agents in certain areas. Workforce management can also help with simulations and contingency planning, so contact centers can effective build plans that will cover volume spikes or other unexpected activity in the future. As for the holidays, a great scheduling solution can enable managers to determine the most cost-effective program: for example, is it more cost-effective to hire contingent workers to fill in during times of peak demand, to give part-time workers more hours, to outsource, or to pay employees overtime?
If your workforce management solution can’t help you answer these questions, chances are good that it’s time to look into a new approach.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi