Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Cloud-based Delivery Brings High Workforce Management Functionality to Smaller Companies
Call centers are expensive to run, and the single biggest cost is labor. For the average contact center, about 65 percent of costs are directly related to labor. This figure can go even higher when the contact center is over-staffed. While you want to ensure that each time your customer calls, someone is available to take that call, it’s important not to overstaff, which is costly and can lead to agent boredom and burnout.
Understaffing is also a problem. While it’s tempting to keep labor costs low by having a minimum number of agents available to take calls and multimedia contacts, sudden call spikes can lengthen call queues, forcing customers to wait on hold for excessive periods. This has been demonstrated to be damaging to customer relationships.
Forecasting is the best way to get the right amount of agents in the right place at the right time. Many companies – particularly smaller companies – still engage in a lot of manual scheduling processes, which leads to imperfect forecasting, and either under-staffing or under-staffing, both of which are costly and damaging to the call center.
For many companies, cloud delivery has been the best way to gain affordable and easy to use call center forecasting and employee scheduling software solutions such as those from Monet Software. This include ACD (automatic call distributor) integration, real-time agent adherence, intra-day management, agent-supervisor collaboration and performance analytics, all features that were formerly available to only the largest companies buying premise-based solutions.
Some of the practices enabled by cloud-based workforce management solutions include:
- Improving forecast accuracy and track intra-day trends for immediate adjustments;
- Creating optimal schedule to consistently meet service levels and control costs;
- Monitoring agent adherence and other metrics in real-time to take immediate action; and
- Tracking and analyzing key metrics to optimize service quality and center performance
Via cloud-based workforce management solutions, call centers can achieve a dual purpose: they can improve service levels and while at the same time reducing customer support costs without the upfront expenses and IT requirements of traditional workforce management software or the limitations of legacy or manual methods. By using historical data, companies can get a better idea of call demand and ensure that they staff much more closely to the real call volume, eliminating the problems inherent in over-staffing or under-staffing.
To watch a demo of how cloud-based forecasting can benefit a contact center, click here.
Edited by Ashley Caputo