Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Real-Time Adherence Monitoring Ensures Contact Center Scheduling Excellence
One of the most critical elements of contact center operations is the schedule. A lot of effort goes into forecasting and scheduling, and the end result is (or is supposed to be) a realistic guideline for the day to ensure that customer are receiving the level of customer support they demand. Without this important element, companies risk customers waiting too long for answers, or conversely paying for too many resources while agents sit idle.
The best schedule in the world, however, won’t help a contact center if personnel are sticking to that schedule. A lack of adherence is one of the biggest factors in derailing a company’s efforts to provide high quality customer support. For this reason, building a good schedule isn’t enough. Companies need to constantly monitor adherence through the schedule throughout the day if they hope to provide the kind of customer service they wish to, according to workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software.
“Easier and more accurate monitoring across all agent activities and automated comparison with scheduled activities has a direct impact on the bottom line through improved services levels, better cost management und increased productivity,” writes the company.
While most contact centers do some monitoring, the results are often available hours or days late to help stick to today’s schedule. For this reason, monitoring in real-time is critical to boost schedule adherence, and this monitoring must keep track of all agent activities, not just telephone calls. Many of today’s schedule adherence solutions extends monitoring to all agent activities, such as call wrap-up, special after-work, out-bound preparation and other required activities that impact the service levels and performance of a call center.
Building a schedule for telephone work alone won’t cut it. It’s often the non-telephone work that sends a schedule off the rails. A high quality scheduling solution will enable call center managers to add any agent activity type into adherence monitoring. This includes non-phone work on channels such as e-mail and social media, and non-customer work such as training, breaks and after-call wrap-up. Managers can set up custom thresholds and variances to exactly match the center’s needs, and monitor all agent activities in real-time with custom alerts.
When it comes to contact center scheduling, the old phrase, “no news is good news” simply doesn’t apply. Small variances from the schedule can lead quickly to larger ones, and companies can fall hopelessly behind before they know it. Ensure that when you build a schedule, you’re accounting for everything that could happen on a day to day basis. Even more importantly, ensure that when the schedule goes out of alignment, you know about it the moment it happens.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi