Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Schedule Flexibility Benefits Both Call Center Employees and Their Employers
While it’s important for a call center manager to know how to build an accurate schedule, that schedule is useless if workers aren’t complying with it. After all, the schedule’s value isn’t as it looks on paper, but it’s as it’s adhered to in practice. This means a successful contact center manager must have the ability to create a realistic schedule that takes into account not only phone and multimedia time, but after-call work, employee training and coaching sessions, and breaks and lunches. It must also be flexible enough to absorb unforeseen events such as employee sickness or unscheduled, last-minute events.
There are many ways to ensure compliance with the schedule, but one of the most underappreciated methods is to ensure that employees are happy with the schedule, wrote Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo in a recent blog post.
“An optimized call center schedule becomes even better when your team is satisfied or even really happy with their assigned shifts,” he wrote. “Of course, that is not an easy task.”
Some of the ways managers can ensure that employees are happy with their schedules is by building in perks that workers will value, such as shift bidding, shift trading and flexible start and end times. Using these methods, which many workforce management and scheduling solutions offer today, employees have more freedom to build schedules that fit their lives better. They can trade schedules with other employees without a manager’s approval, bid for available shifts if they want to earn some extra money, and bid to have their schedules adjusted in order to match to their work to their lives better.
All of these abilities rest on the implementation of an automatic scheduling solution, which the UK Website Call Centre Helper emphasizes can offer a win-win proposition to both employees and workers.
“Automatic scheduling systems allow you to create and manage an effective schedule by taking into account your business requirements, your employees’ needs and your scheduling rules,” according to the Website.
These solutions also take into consideration all the skills your agents have to ensure that people with the right abilities are always in place to handle the predicted workload of the contact center. Allowing employees flexibility while scheduling manually for all these skills would induce headaches in even the most skilled call center manager.
“Businesses must look for a solution which does not over-simplify the scheduling process, yet retains usability and the flexibility to make changes,” wrote Call Centre Helper.
It’s a way for companies to offer employees perks that make them feel more valued and eliminate any perceptions of favoritism among managers. At the same time, it ensures that no customer contact ever suffers because of a lack of scheduled resources.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi