Better Call Center Operations Start with Better Scheduling

Would you rather overstaff your contact center or understaff it? Many contact centers find themselves facing this question at some point. By overstaffing, you can ensure that you always have enough personnel to cover unexpected spikes in call volume and other customer contacts. Overstaffing is very expensive, however, and leads to bored agents that burn out easily. Understaffing, which saves money, is risky because it means in the event of high volumes, customers are left hanging on hold, getting angry. Understaffing leads to frazzled agents who…wait for it…burn out easily.

The solution, it would seem, is to neither understaff nor overstaff. This means that contact centers need to ensure they are building the best possible schedules based on the most reliable forecasts.

There are hidden costs of improper scheduling as well as the generally understood one of irritating customers and spending more money: overtime. Contact centers that aren’t working to create better schedules often find the need to build in overtime and extra shifts. This isn’t only expensive; it could actually make your agents less effective, according to a recent blog post by tech blogger Rocky Sunico.

“While most folks end up dreading overtime as the primary disruption to their sense of work-life balance, the call center world tends to be a bit more extreme,” wrote Sunico. “Beyond the potential for needing to stay at the office longer than originally projected, working in the BPO [business process outsourcing] industry tends to involve more severe schedule changes that totally throw your sleeping habits out of whack.”

As we all know, tired agents are not effective agents, and the biggest marker of contact center success is effective, engaged agents. If your agents are zombies all the time because of their erratic schedules, they’re not going to be particularly effective.

While many contact centers still schedule manually, using spreadsheets, the wisdom of this practice becomes more questionable with each year that passes. The tools available today to help contact centers forecast, schedule and keep an eye on intraday intervals down to the five minute mark, are simply impossible to replicate with (often overtired) human brains. Such tools can also keep an eye on the well-being of agents, ensuring that their schedules aren’t becoming too random.

Essentially, a first-class scheduling solution (generally built into a workforce management or workforce optimization solution) can help you protect everyone: managers, supervisors, call center agents and, of course, customers.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi