Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Intra-Day Planning is Key to Preparing for Unforeseen Contact Center Events
Building a contact center schedule is both an art and a science. It requires experience, deep knowledge of the contact center and its agents, and a firm grasp on the center’s historical data. Unfortunately, the average contact center manager can’t see into the future, so static or spreadsheet-based schedules are often unable to accommodate unforeseen events.
Agents often call in sick or leave early, systems can go down, and weather events can make it difficult for agents to report. Marketing and advertising’s activities, if not properly communicated to the contact center, can lead to spikes in call volume. When this happens, schedules are often rendered largely useless, and metrics begin to look poor as call queues increase and wait times go up. This, in turn, risks damaging customer relationships.
Intra-day planning the key for any contact center that wishes to be able to adjust for unforeseen events. This type of focused adjustability is the hallmark of some workforce management and scheduling solutions, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo. It also doesn’t take a PhD in mathematical algorithms and probability theories, as it once did.
“Using a graphical display of agent schedules, a manager can drag and drop breaks, lunches and other exceptions to adjust the contact center schedule as needed,” writes Ciarlo. “Real-time updates are instantly recorded, and any surpluses or shortages are displayed for any part of the day. When the unexpected occurs, managers will instantly know the best way to react without sacrificing customer service.
Companies should look for a solution with robust exception planning, which will allow them to build in flexibility for events such as employee jury duty, vacations and training and coaching sessions. These can be scheduled far into the future or recorded as recurring exceptions, according to Ciarlo.
“While many of these activities can be documented days or weeks in advance, the Exception Planner also supports mid-day exceptions as they occur, taking them into account while choosing shifts and scheduling breaks,” he writes.
The result is a sufficiently flexible schedule that can absorb exceptions and unforeseen events easily, allowing the contact center to continue to offer a high baseline of support quality while at the same time ensuring that employee schedules don’t need to be carved in stone. Or carved into a spreadsheet, as the case may be.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi