Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Boosting Call Center Staffing Effectiveness with Scheduling Flexibility
While contact center success depends in part on how accurate the day’s schedule is – without a schedule based on an accurate forecast, contact centers will find themselves missing key metrics and service levels – building a good schedule is as much an art as it is a science.
Many contact centers build schedules with only active time on the phone in mind. While it’s true this is important to get right, it’s also critical to build non-work time into the schedule with a high degree of accuracy. By managing agent resources to cover important non-call activities such as training, research, call wrap-up and other activities, contact center managers and schedulers can ensure that schedules are as accurate as possible.
In addition, making sure breaks and lunches are placed correctly within agent schedules has always been a tedious and drawn out task. Luckily, many of today’s modern workforce management and scheduling solutions automatically factor in non-call work and breaks and lunches while observing service level goals in order to generate an optimized schedule. It helps take some of the pain out of the scheduling process and ensure that operations run as smoothly as possible.
Another feature of today’s modern workforce management solutions that is critical to managing both the schedule and the workforce is the ability to assign agents to the schedule based on availability, preferences and work rules. Without this ability to manage exceptions, schedules can suffer.
In a recent video demo shows some of the best practices in scheduling building from Monet Software. Including how its Monet WFM Live solution allows managers to un-assign agents or swap agents simply by highlighting the individual and clicking the right option (un-assign or assign).
“If you are un-assigning an agent that slot would become vacant,” says Monet. “In order to assign another agent, all you do is you look at the agents that were not assigned for that day, highlight one of them, and then click assign. Monet also allows you to do unlimited changes within the roster -- you can rerun it, or copy it to other days. Using this allows the manager or supervisor flexibility within their daily schedule.”
Flexibility is the key here. When schedules are poured in concrete, they might look great on paper, but if changing requirements turns the schedule on its ear, it becomes useless, and this increases the chances that staffing requirements will not be met and service levels will be missed.