Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Cold and Flu Season is Coming: How is Your Call Center Exception Management?
There are few things that make a call center manager panic quicker than the realization that, after the schedule is built, one or more agents has called in sick or simply not shown up. Most contact centers today continue to use a proprietary system for schedule building that may consist of nothing more than a spreadsheet with a lot of calculations. (Hard to believe, but some contact centers are still doing it on graph paper with pencil.)
Exception handling, or the way a contact center manager copes with unexpected hiccups in the schedule such as agent absences, is what sets a good contact center apart from a mediocre or poor contact center. Using a manual system, one or more employees calling in sick is a catastrophe, unless the manager can roust a replacement out of bed and get that agent in very quickly. Since this isn’t always possible, using a scheduling and forecasting solution that has superior exception handling is critical, writes Monet Software’s Chuck Ciarlo in a recent blog post. Choosing a workforce management (WFM) solution with an exceptions feature, he says, streamlines the tracking process on no-show employees. Once the missing agent is noted, the list of assigned employees is automatically adjusted accordingly. Try doing that on a spreadsheet. But it goes beyond that, says Ciarlo.
“This same capability also covers agents who miss part of their shift, either through a training session, a special project, or just because they were late,” he writes. “And for those enterprising agents that work overtime, their efforts are recorded automatically as well.”
A cutting-edge workforce management solution allows a contact center to better measure and boost agent productivity in addition to just preventing panic from an absent agent. Ciarlo provides an example:
“Perhaps you have discovered that customers waited an average of 60 seconds longer for an agent between 1:00 pm and 1:30 pm on a Wednesday. A spreadsheet might just show 20 agents working that half hour. But WFM data will show that two agents didn’t start their shift until 1:10, since the lunch service was slow at Olive Garden that afternoon. Now you know that only 18 agents were at their desks, which likely accounted for the delays.”
With this kind of insight, contact centers can build better and more accurate schedules, and managers aren’t put into a nail-biting crisis each time a particularly nasty cold blows through the contact center.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi