Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Call Center Scheduling in the Cloud adds Communication and Collaboration to Your Team
Call center scheduling and workforce management solutions have come a long way since the days of the excel spreadsheets, and the options available to customers both small and large can be mind boggling. Regardless of what a person needs the reality is if you’re not managing your workers effectively then you’re losing both time and money in the process.
Hosting is gets buzz these days in almost every field imaginable, so it’s not surprising that a hosted solution for workforce management and call center scheduling is not only available but is in many ways superior to the premise based solutions of decades passed. Hosted solutions are arguably cheaper, more flexible and easier to maintain then anything that had come out of the previous generation.
As far as workforce management itself hosted software can offer platform for collaboration unlike traditional methods. Many hosted call center scheduling solutions sport Web-based agent/supervisor portals that not only allow for full visibility of the schedule, they also give agents the option of swapping shifts with other agents, in the event they have a conflict. Very often this can be done without manager approval. Couple that with the standard workforce management ability to track the schedule adherence of an agent and you have a significant ROI already.
But the fact that hosted scheduling solutions are gaining traction in the call center world goes well beyond this fact alone. Hosted options do not require the upkeep that server side solutions do, they’re also updated regularly to keep the software cutting edge. Cloud computing solutions were designed with lots of users and different customer needs in mind. Therefore, they have a more flexible architecture and often allow customization and configuration without programming.
A hosted workforce management program can help the call center gain the strategic and competitive advantage it needs to build profitability and growth in a dynamic industry.
Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Chris DiMarco