Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
How to Optimize Workforce Management and Call Center Scheduling for Performance
Managing performance is one of the necessary evils in the call center. It’s not enough to simply make sure your agents can complete a set number of calls within a certain period of time. Instead, they need to be efficient, proactive and focused on the customer experience. The challenge is doing that and still meeting management expectations. It helps when workforce management and call center scheduling can work together.
The measurement of call center performance helps to drive the alignment of processes, resources and people to ensure business goals are realized. To that end, Monet Software offers Monet Metrics to ensure the creation of a proactive approach to this measurement. With as much as 70 percent of the budget going towards staffing, it’s essential to focus on how to make the most of this spend.
With a unified view of agent performance, supervisors are better equipped to influence activities, schedule adherence and even cost management. Even slight improvements are measureable. When a unified view is available, resources are better utilized, cost management is readily applied and service levels improve. Why? Supervisors can not only see all activities in one view, they can also gain a better understanding of how one activity can impact another. They also spend less time focusing on a small issue when a bigger problem may be in the works.
For instance, the ability to break metrics down by time period, supervisors can compare scheduled activity against actual activity to determine whether or not projections are met. They are can also gauge abandoned calls versus calls answered, schedule adherence, exceptions and more with just one look. This information changes dynamically according to what is happening in the call center at any given moment, while also storing the information for easy reference later when reviewing an employee’s performance.
When a specific metric captures attention, the supervisor can easily drill down into a more granular view to better understand what is happening or has happened at any given moment. This information could be crucial in an agent review or coaching session if an area needs to be addressed directly with the agent to promote better performance.
Access to real-time alerts is also important as the supervisor needs to know when a change needs to be made to accommodate a shift in availability of agents, call volume or anything else that can impact performance. If they have the information at the ready, they’re more likely to respond accordingly.
Planning call center scheduling and workforce management activities can be a challenging endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be crippling to performance. With Monet Software, supervisors are able to focus more time on performance and less time on monitoring.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi