Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Happy Employees Should Be the Goal with Call Center Scheduling
The small business is the lifeblood of the American economy. While we all tend to look to the Googles and the Apples of the world as driving opportunities, the reality is that innovation, job creation and expansion have always been driven by the small business. For those at the helm of these operations, sustainability is dependent upon the satisfaction of the client base.
For that reason, quality customer care has to be the focus in the call center. To accomplish your customer care goals, you have to keep your agents happy and satisfied with their role. This goal is often reached with proper call center scheduling. A recent Huffington Post (News - Alert) article by Max Yoder, Co-Founder and CEO of Lesson.ly focused on the happiness of the customer service employee and how to keep your turnover low.
While this post highlighted more customer service training, competitive pay, encouragement and feedback, there’s more to the satisfaction of the agent base than what meets the eye. Yes, you want to pay your people what they’re worth to the organization, but money is not always the key motivator. People tend to want to work for companies who value them as individuals, both in their contributions to the company overall and respect for their lives outside of work.
For this reason, call center scheduling needs to be a priority. In too many cases, that means a focus on proper forecasting to schedule agents according to projected volumes. While this is a good metric to capture and follow, it’s not the only metric that matters. Your agents need to feel like they bring something of value to the operation and the satisfaction of the customer base and the way you schedule their time communicates a lot.
Take, for example, the manual scheduling process that balances the load among the available agents. On paper, it seems like a great way to tackle the shifts you need covered. Take a step back, however, and you may notice that Tony asked for second shift only and Marybeth prefers to take third shift so she and her husband can trade caring for their children. You’ll also notice that Steve asked off for the birth of his first child and Monica is on vacation for the last three days of the week.
Yes, there will always be requests like these in any environment, but your willingness to respect them as guidelines for call center scheduling communicates to your staff that you respect their contribution to the team. And, when you keep your staff happy, they are much more likely to ensure all of your customers are happy after every interaction.
If you’re not sure how to make that work in your manual environment, it may be time to dig into available scheduling software to see what it can do for you.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi