While consumer-based contact centers have little choice to be efficient – the competition is only a click away, and customers are increasingly demanding when it comes to quality of service – municipal call centers have no such mandates. This doesn’t mean they should be off the hook, however. Citizens’ perception of government sours with every bad call, and a properly run call center is an efficient one that saves money and manpower – something that would definitely assist cash-strapped municipal call centers.

Each week seems to bring a new nightmare story about a municipal call center in distress. This week, Michigan’s News-Herald reported on the Taylor, Michigan city hall contact center, which had been implemented to solve problems, not create them. Citizens began complaining of unusually long wait times when calling the contact center and excessive numbers of dropped calls. Call center operators were supposed to either route the calls to the appropriate departments or attempt to help the caller on the line with their questions.

It didn’t work out that way. Staffing shortages due to retirements and agents calling in sick had thrown the call center into disarray, leaving citizens grumbling. Hiring freezes and union contracts had left the call center short-staffed and the citizens of Taylor without an efficient resource to answer their questions.

Workforce management technology, while not often used by municipal contact centers, can be the answer to helping contact centers run smoothly, even when human resources are at a minimum. It can help balance days off and vacation time, and recalibrate when agents call in sick. Particularly when combined with a hosted contact center platform (which can allow agents to work from home or remote locations), formal workforce management can accomplish the kind of balanced coverage for the call center, based on historical information and projections, that a manual process simply can’t.

Forecasting can identify trends and predict future call volumes, handle times, and staffing requirements for your entire call center operation. Modern scheduling functionality allows call centers to create agent schedules that conform to working rules – a particularly important asset when working with unions – while optimizing your staffing costs based on forecasted headcount requirements. Finally, monitoring agent adherence to their current schedule in real-time allows managers to make intraday adjustments, ensuring the contact center is staffed to minimum standards at all times.

While callers may not expect quite as much from city and state call centers as they do from commercial entities, they still expect that someone knowledgeable will pick up their call soon after they place it. They don’t expect to be transferred back and forth only to find insufficient answers to their questions. In the long run, advanced workforce management can go a long way toward solving the ever-present problems inherent in the average municipal call center: making more out of ever-shrinking budgets.