Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Selling Workforce Management Purchases to the Executive Layer
While running a contact center on a day-to-day basis is far from easy – it requires juggling a number of balls - from agent hiring and training, to unpredictable absences and ensuring service goals are met – it’s often an easy prospect compared to the hurdle of justifying purchases to upper management. Many companies are tight on the purse strings today (for good reason), so they are often unwilling to authorize purchases that don’t lead to an improvement to the bottom line in an obvious way.
Since call center managers are often tasked with getting approvals for new purchases from executives who don’t fully understand the workings of the call center, managers and operations people frequently need to educate the upper layers of a company on precisely how a technology will benefit the company, efficiency or the bottom line.
In the case of workforce management, it may be widely felt among executives that as long as the current method is “good enough,” there is no need to update. Call center managers’ task becomes difficult in the face of this belief…but it’s certainly not impossible according to a recent blog post by Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization company Monet Software.
“Making the case for this purchase should not be difficult given the inherent benefits derived from its installation, not the least of which is a net cost savings within months, and a boost in efficiency that will also have a positive impact on the yearly budget,” writes Ciarlo.
A surprising number of companies still schedule the contact center manually, using spreadsheet applications and specialized algorithms. While they might produce schedules that seem adequate most of the time, adequate shouldn’t be good enough for the modern contact center.
Today’s workforce management solutions, many of which are delivered by the cloud (which keeps investment and maintenance costs down) offer more accurate forecasting and scheduling based on more factors that can be reckoned manually. This, in turn, reduces or even eliminates instances of agent understaffing and overstaffing. Understaffing, of course, can negatively affect the quality of customer care and drive customers away. Overstaffing is like lighting money on fire. These solutions can also improve agent schedule adherence to reduce shrinkage, free up managers so they can spend more time managing, reduce overtime expenses and reduce agent turnover by empowering agents to take more control of their work schedules.
Ciarlo outlines three steps contact center managers should take when pitching a workforce management solution to executives.
- Identify the contact center’s most pressing challenges. What takes up too much time? What processes are bleeding money? What is the most frustrating and easily fixable thing you can do right now to make more money for the organization?
- Gather and analyze the data that impacts your performance and demonstrate how automated WFM will improve your call center’s performance.
- Present that information to executives, outlining the ways that workforce management will transform the company’s contact center operations and customer support goals.
It’s important to note that even during the worst of the recent recession, sales remained brisk in the contact center for workforce optimization tools such as workforce management and quality management. There’s a reason for this: these solutions allow companies to do more on the customer service front with fewer resources. And that is the very definition of wise spending.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi