Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Overcoming the Challenge of Schedule Adherence for Non-Call Call Center Work
Call center scheduling is tricky for many reasons. For starters, you can only guess how many calls your center is going to receive on any given day, from hour to hour and from minute to minute. Secondly, you can only guess how many agents will call home sick or leave early, not feeling well or for a family emergency. One of the most prominent reasons call center scheduling is so difficult is that call center work isn't simply phone work.
Tracking and monitoring schedule adherence becomes extra challenging when agents have many different non-call tasks – call wrap-up, training, reading internal communications, attending a meeting and other tasks – exceptions and states that it becomes difficult to plan for and then monitor those states.
Call center workforce optimization company Monet Software wrote in a blog post that this is precisely what its Advanced Agent Adherence solution was designed for. It allows the creation of custom states and rules to match the precise non-call scheduling needs of a call center, allowing users to create custom states for any number of activities, such as call wrap-up, special after call work or outbound preparation; set thresholds for each state, indicating how much time is considered “in adherence” so that time in a particular state can automatically be broken down into acceptable and unacceptable time; and define which states are included or not included in the agent adherence calculation
Exceptions and non-call activities are added by default, says Monet, and will be considered “scheduled activities,” along with available, break, lunch, and logged out states. Call center managers can customize which statuses are allowed and not allowed for each scheduled activity.One size fits all are seldom good solutions, particularly for call centers with very unique needs. For this reason, a very flexible approach to agent adherence monitoring can provide a call center with a new level of accuracy in managing call center performance and the potential to dramatically reduce non-productive agent time, says the company.
Better adherence and better use of non-call time means better service provided to customers, less agent frustration and burn-out, and the ability to boost service levels.
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Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli