Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Avoiding Detrimental Shortcuts in Call Center Scheduling
When it comes to shortcuts, they are usually a good thing. A shortcut on our morning commute might cut out five to 10 minutes. A shortcut in cooking a complex recipe might save some work. In a business environment, shortcuts can seemingly save money and time. But it’s critical for companies to ask themselves what might suffer if they take the easy way out. Often times, it’s customer service, particularly in the contact center.
“Even with the traditional call center being replaced by seemingly more efficient and capable ‘contact centers’ or ‘information centers,’ many businesses are still tempted by the shortcuts that may lower initial costs but can wreak havoc with their customer satisfaction and retention rates,” wrote Adele Halsall in the Customer Engagement blog.
Many companies focus on making it easier and more convenient for call center agents to do their jobs or cheaper for the organization to do business, never realizing that shortening or cutting these processes may make it harder for customers to do business. During a time when companies are (or should be) competing with one another based on a customer’s ease of doing business, this is a critical mistake.
“Call centers are often seen as a way to cut costs or to keep costs as low as possible,” wrote Halsall. “One way companies manage this is by reducing staff numbers, or relying on the same technology and equipment long after it has gone past its best.”
By understaffing a contact center, a company may save money, but it risks building long call queues, burning out agents with overwork and not having the right skills available when the customer needs an agent with those skills. Occupancy levels will shoot through the roof and service levels will drop through the floor. Of course, overstaffing isn’t the answer…this is expensive and can led to idle agents who become bored and inattentive.
For this reason, it’s critical that contact centers today have a robust scheduling process in place, and this doesn’t mean a manually created spreadsheet that has no flexibility, automation or intra-day management. An automated scheduling solution allows managers to make the most of the staff they have, allowing companies to build a call center work force that is precisely the right size. Managers can enjoy benefits such as real-time monitoring and alerts if the schedule is going off the rails, and they can schedule all activities – non-phone channels, training, meets and more – along with calls. Skills-based schedules ensure that the right coverage is available at all times, and employees appreciate the perks that come with many automated call center scheduling solutions such as shift swapping and bidding and automated time-off requests.
There are few tools for an efficiently run contact center more important than scheduling. When companies go to the marketplace with their precious technology purchasing budgets, the best possible foundation they could put in place for high quality customer support is a modern, automated scheduling solution.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi