Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Call Center Scheduling Software is Essential for the Holiday Push
Are you ready for the holiday push?
The holiday season can be one of the most stressful for call center managers. Volume is up from increased customer activity, whether product questions, issues or purchases. Seasonal agents need to quickly ramp-up or they will be a weak link in the call center chain and introduce problems when time is most limited. Most agents also will be looking for vacation time, since nobody wants to be working during the holidays.
This complex environment is when call center scheduling software is most important.
“These systems save hours by eliminating the kind of administrative overhead involved in manually receiving, evaluating, approving and denying vacation requests, while also helping to avert staffing shortfalls that can send call center service levels tumbling,” noted Dennis Cox (News - Alert) in an article we published earlier this year on vacation scheduling.
A good call center scheduling system can help automate the process scheduling agents, predict staffing needs during the high call volumes that come with the holidays, and give real-time visibility into agent availability issues, performance slowdowns and improper skill allocation.
A good example of call center scheduling software that can simplify the crazy holiday season and ensure that average hold times and first-call resolution times stay where they should is Monet Software’s Contact Center Workforce Management solution.
Monet’s cloud-based WFM solution helps managers run simulations to calculate a precise forecast for future call volume, agent requirements and average handle time for any time interval of the day. It uses historical data to make these predictions. It also has an advanced scheduling engine that incorporates all call types and other activities to generate staffing schedules that optimize a wide range of factors such as agent availability, work rules, skills, holidays, breaks, service levels and center budgets.
This includes real-time management of agents throughout the day through the use of a graphical display of agents' schedules that can be manipulated by dragging and dropping breaks, lunches and other exceptions. Key during the holidays, the Monet WFM solution integrates an exception calendar that simplifies scheduling of agent exceptions such as time off and one-time or recurring training meetings.
Since keeping seasonal employees to the standards of the call center also is an important challenge during the holidays, the Monet solution also comes with robust adherence functionality that can compare planned agent activity to actual activities throughout the day, monitoring key performance indicators in real-time such as handle times.
Without a doubt, the holiday season is the busiest for most call centers. While call center scheduling software is useful any time of year, it becomes essential during the holidays.
Call centers that don’t have a solid call center scheduling solution in place already to handle the challenge would be advised to make this a priority now, before it is too late. Even if a change in software is needed, it is still possible to make the jump since cloud-based call center scheduling solutions such as Monet’s WFM are now available in the cloud. This makes it easy to bring these systems online fast.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi