Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Remembering the Basics When it Comes to Call Center Scheduling
Ultimately, every call center, no matter how large or small, sophisticated or simple, is tasked with building a schedule. While contact centers do this in a variety of ways, either manually, with spreadsheets or with workforce management and scheduling the solutions, the outcome needs to be the same: you need to have enough agents to handle call traffic, including unexpected spikes, on staff at all times.
While deliberately over-staffing can ensure this outcome – that no customers need ever wait on hold – it’s an expensive way to do things. Overstaffing is expensive and tends to lead to bored agents who are more likely to churn.
We have prepared a list of best practices when it comes to call center scheduling. Though some of these tips might seem obvious, there is evidence that many call centers aren’t following even the simplest common-sense guidelines when it comes to building schedules.
Build the schedule to suit customers, not supervisors or agents. While it may be natural to schedule employee lunches at lunch time, this just might be your busiest call time, as customers take a break from their own work to do personal business. It’s critical to examine the call center’s historical patterns before building a schedule.
Identify multi-skilled agents. While it would be nice if all call queues remained even, with about the same number of customers waiting in each, this is seldom the case. By identifying agents with multiple skills and factoring that into the schedule, you can have them ready to “cross over” to another queue if necessary.
Know the difference between talk time and average handle time. Too many contact centers think these metrics are the same. But many customer interactions require a few seconds or minutes of after-work after each call, ensuring that the transaction that has just taken place with the customer doesn’t get lost or have errors. Remember to build in this after-work time.
Ensure that agents can always see their schedules at a glance. Many manual processes create a master calendar for the call center, but fail to create individualized schedules for agents. Without these, there is more room for errors and no-shows that could affect service quality.
Consider giving agents some power. While it’s not uncommon for agents to swap schedules or bid for schedules in most call centers, for a call center that uses manual scheduling, it’s an administrative nightmare. Consider some of today’s more sophisticated workforce management and scheduling solutions that allow for automated schedule bidding and swapping based on parameters set by executives. It leaves managers free to do more managing.
Try real-time reporting. Most contact centers generate reports, but it’s often days or even weeks later that they are examined. Many of today’s workforce management solutions have real-time alerting capabilities that allow managers to know when things are about to go wrong, so they can take action to prevent problems.
Consider using simulations. For particularly tricky schedules (think holidays), many contact centers find putting a schedule through a “dry run” to see if it’s going to work a valuable exercise.
It’s not just calls that need to be scheduled. Remember that agents’ days aren’t spent entirely on the telephone. Many call center managers forget that alongside phone coverage, it’s important to include things like training sessions, meetings with supervisors or managers and administrative work into the schedule.
While it’s unlikely that any contact center can ever achieve perfection in the call center – it’s far too unpredictable and complex a place for that – by following best practices and understanding historical precedent, contact centers can ensure their customers aren’t left hanging.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi