Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Better Call Center Scheduling and Not More Automation is the Way to Boost Service and Lower Costs
Many companies today will go to great lengths to save money, even when it doesn’t really make sense. In a customer support scenario, these efforts can be disastrous. According to a recent study by CareerBuilder and Economic Modeling Specialist International, more than one-third of companies have expressed an interest in replacing human customer service agents with automated system in the next 10 years. While automation certainly has a time and a place – for simple transactions such as checking balances, or for routing phone calls and handling routine inquiries – customers still value live help, and when they can’t get it, it’s likely they will go where they can get human help.
According to a recent blog post by Michele McGovern writing for Customer Experience Insight, as many as 35 percent of firms that eliminated jobs for technology-based service hired people back because the technology didn’t work out, the same survey found. Chances are good that this experimental boondoggle in 100 percent automation cost these companies a lot of money and customer goodwill.
“On the bright side, most firms that replaced workers with automation added new positions,” wrote McGovern.
While automation has an important place in customer support, today’s complex product and service marketplace is actually raising the stakes for human assistance in the call center. Agents need to be better educated, more resourceful and cross-trained to handle many channels and technologies. This fact not only gives rise to human resources challenges, but it raises the stakes for call center scheduling, as well. Whereas the contact centers of old handled only a few skills for agents – language skills, for example – today’s call center is often schedules dozens, if not hundreds, of different skills, from product and service expertise to soft skills such as customer retention, cooling off angry customers, empathy in listening, interaction on social media, outbound outreach and more.
For the contact centers that are still using spreadsheets such as Excel to create schedules, the challenges – already large today – will become nearly impossible to cope with. Multiple channels, multiple contact center locations, home-based agents, and a large variety of skills will mean that manual scheduling methods will be a barrier to success.
A modern workforce management and scheduling solution can accomplish what large amounts of automation cannot: keeping labor costs in check while actually boosting the quality of customer support being offered. Call centers with flexible, accurate forecasting can ensure that they’re neither over-staffing nor under-staffing, and many call centers find they can improve the quality of service without having to increase headcount. (Indeed, some can even reduce headcount.)
If you’re looking to lower costs in the contact center, cutting services or turning to blanket automation isn’t the answer. Through smart workforce optimization and scheduling, businesses can keep costs down and quality of service up.
Edited by Maurice Nagle