Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Contact Centers Can Save a Quarter of a Workday Every Day By Ditching WFM Spreadsheets
The contact center, more than many other departments or functions in a company, suffers from a certain type of syndrome that can be tied to longevity. Contact centers have been around for decades, so many of the ideas used to manage them are decades old. The same can’t be said of advertising and marketing – functions that have had to evolve to meet new channels such as Internet and social media – or even sales, which has seen automation change the way sales departments sell to customers.
Too many contact centers suffer from “But we’ve always done it this way” syndrome. Managers get in a rut, embrace the familiar, and before they know it, they’re operating a contact center that is inefficient and years or even decades out of date. It may be because budgets are so tight, but more often than not, it’s because managers simply aren’t comfortable taking on board new technologies that might have a learning curve. This is particularly true of workforce management.
“Why else would so many contact centers still use spreadsheets for scheduling, rather than switch to an automated workforce management (WFM) solution?” asked Monet Software’s Chuck Ciarlo in a recent blog post. “The advantages to doing so are many – and will be obvious from the first day with the new system in place.”
These advantages include better forecasting thanks to more extensive analysis of historical trends and outside influences, more accuracy, intraday management, increased flexibility, the ability to track adherence, reporting, exception handling and more.
While these features may seem somewhat abstract, in the end what they translate to is money and time. Contact center managers have a lot of duties, and wrangling a spreadsheet-based schedule all day shouldn’t be the primary one. Because of the static nature of spreadsheets, when one factor becomes invalid (two workers arrive late, for example, or someone calls in sick), that manager spends the entirety of the day struggling to catch up…and often failing.
“With WFM, managers can save as much as 25 percent off the time they devote to creating schedules with spreadsheets. That’s two hours from every eight-hour day,” writes Ciarlo.
With that extra two hours a day managers can gain back using a modern workforce management solution, they can spend more time coaching employees, evaluating performance and boosting employee engagement, teaching new skills, listening to customer feedback and finding new ways to save time and money.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi