Call Center Management Featured Article
Call Center Management Requires Flexible Tools to Weather Call and Contact Volume Storms
Forecasting call center volume is a tricky business. Without a crystal ball, managers need to make a lot of educated guesses based on historical call volume and new developments (product releases, sales, etc.) or current events (storms, power outages). Managers also need to analyze the call center’s existing key performance indicators and determine whether the current staffing is meeting the forecast call/contact volume. The problem is, it’s so easy to get wrong.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an important way to measure how the contact center is doing. The problem is that statistics, in a vacuum, can be very deceptive, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo. It’s particularly important to beware of the most commonly tracked KPI, average handle time.
“Of course you should review average handle time (AHT) and call volume, but you should also determine how one impacts the other,” wrote Ciarlo. “Is AHT better in the morning than overnight? Is that just a result of less calls coming in? Perhaps, but you may also have fewer agents working in the wee hours as well, so the answer may not be that simple. Maybe your night-shifters are dealing with lonely folks looking for someone to talk for a while after midnight – or maybe they need a little more training.”
Making decisions based on KPIs can lead to disastrously erroneous actions that result in either overstaffing, which costs money, or understaffing, which costs customer relationships. Forecasting with insufficient data – particularly when it comes to service levels, which can be misleading -- can also lead to big problems. Many organizations plan for the next month without understanding that big changes can happen within a minute or two. Manual methods of forecasting and scheduling don’t allow for changes in small intervals.
“Review monthly and weekly service levels, but understand that within those longer time periods there are a thousand variables that influence how the numbers worked out,” wrote Ciarlo. “To gain more insight, shorten the timespan to as little as 30 minutes – perhaps even 15 minutes for a busy contact center or for peak calling periods. You’ll receive a more accurate view of what you’re doing right and what needs work.”
You may believe that since your call volume is predictable, there will never be a need to make fast changes to your scheduling. This may be true in a small company with very few employees who are all in one location, but it will become harder as the company (and the customer base) grows. For this reason, choosing solutions that have built in collaboration capabilities is critical, according to Ciarlo.
“Sometimes the reasons your forecasts miss the mark have nothing to do with internal operations,” wrote Ciarlo. “You can adjust your staffing and shift numbers, but in a larger organization you have no control over when marketing announces a 24-hour sale, or how customer-billing cycles (that trigger billing inquiries) are structured.”
Expectations of the contact center today are high. The responsibilities of the contact center are also on the rise as new channels and new omnichannel customer support strategies come into play. Without up-to-date contact center management solutions that can weather the storm, companies will experience more dysfunction where it really hurts: in the customer relationship.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi