Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Intraday Management is Critical to Accurate Call Center Schedules
While most contact centers engage in some sort of scheduling system in order to ensure they have the right resources in place at the right times, most of them build schedules on a daily basis. If the schedule that is drawn in the morning goes off the rails by the afternoon, there is little ability to make adjustments. For this reason, more successful contact centers consider the ability to manage the workforce throughout the day – sometimes down to time intervals as small as 15 minutes – critical for success.
While most contact centers begin the day with a fresh schedule, the reality is that “stuff happens.” Agents call in sick. Call volumes spike for unforeseen reasons. Agents are late returning from breaks or lunches, or go home in the middle of the day. Without the ability to manage a schedule on an intraday basis, many contact centers find themselves scrabbling to cope with service levels when call volume is very different from what it was projected to be at 8:00 am.
Many of today’s modern workforce management solutions, such as those from workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software, allow managers and schedulers the flexibility to alter the forecast to suit changing conditions or to play out various “what if” scenarios that are critical to building a meaningful and accurate schedule.
These solutions provide the initial agent requirements based on historical call information and trending analysis as well as service level objectives. Agent requirements can be displayed in 15-minute intervals along with projected occupancy rates. Agent’s additional hours required to properly serve non-call related activities are also displayed.
Monet’s WFM Live solution allows schedulers to select the total day change tab and make adjustments to the total day work time.
In a recent demo presentation about Monet WFM Live, the company presents a pertinent example.
“In this example we will increase the average work time by 10 percent, allowing for a less experienced group of agents to be scheduled for this day. Once this information is entered, Monet will adjust both the agent requirements and the average handle time and display the new agent requirements based on the increase in average handle time. The supervisor may continue to make additional changes providing an easy and accurate way to fine tune the daily forecast of call volumes.”
Efficient scheduling, which is critical to the operations of any contact center that hopes to attain high standards, starts with an accurate forecast of call volumes. But without the ability to adjust the schedule throughout the day, these forecasts can become meaningless: an academic exercise that bears little resemblance to the reality of the day.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi