For Effective Call Center Scheduling - Throw Out the Spreadsheets

The spreadsheet is a powerful tool, but will it provide everything you need to keep track of activities in your call center? Even if you opt for call center scheduling spreadsheets that are often available for free, do you simply get what you pay for?

These questions were the focus of a recent Monet Software blog, highlighting the potential sub-standard performance that could result when your call center scheduling is not handled on a higher level. The risk of poor performance does depend upon the size of your call center, and a smaller environment may operate just fine with spreadsheets.

Larger call centers, however, need something more powerful and precise to conduct call center scheduling to ensure the center can meet demand. Any center with 25 agents or more is too large to operate on a spreadsheet call center scheduling platform. This is especially true when fluctuating call center volumes and other conditions can impact the patterns of calls. If spreadsheets are used in these larger centers, the true cost is in lower service levels and lower productivity.

To ensure you can conduct call center scheduling that truly meets your needs, focus on a few points. You need to evaluate whether or not spreadsheets can satisfy your needs, or if you need a more robust workforce management software platform to drive the call center scheduling activities necessary in your environment.

Such points to consider include a flexible schedule – if this is your goal for call center scheduling, spreadsheets can lock you in a box. Spreadsheets really work well with fixed schedules. You might need a flexible scheduling approach that allows you to change start-times, end-times and breaks to boost the service levels you can deliver.

You also want to consider call history in your call center scheduling as this is an effective predictor of what is to come. Spreadsheets lack the ability to support real-time or automated data import of large amounts of data, which could result in lower forecast accuracy. This would most certainly lead to improper staffing in the center which can result in higher costs and lower service levels.

It is very complicated to manage skills-based routing and scheduling with spreadsheets. As a result, when this platform is in use with call center scheduling, call centers cannot realize the productivity advantages of skill-based scheduling.

Spreadsheets also limit your ability to track schedule adherence and exception handling. Tracking and monitoring agent adherence in real-time has a tremendous impact on call center performance, and this is something you just can’t achieve with spreadsheets. Exception handling is also manual and complicated with spreadsheets.

In short, your overall approach to call center scheduling can be streamlined if you just throw the spreadsheets away.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco