Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Trying to Handle Multiple Contact Center Skills with Manual Processes? Good Luck With That
Today, all but the tiniest contact centers engage in some type of skills-based routing. Whether it’s for foreign language abilities, product or service knowledge, to play to a particular agent’s strengths (account retention, for example) or any other reason, most call centers understand that the first available agent is not always the best agent to take the call. While skills-based routing helps both customers and the organization, it complicates the scheduling process. Managers, once tasked to ensure that all communications channels were adequately covered, now need to ensure that all skills are sufficiently available on each shift.
For companies still using more old-fashioned scheduling methods, such as spreadsheets, the job becomes quite a headache. (It’s estimated that some 20 percent of contact centers today are still using manual forecasting and scheduling processes.) Scheduling based on specific skill sets becomes far more easily managedwith workforce management software, according to Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of Monet Software, in a recent blog post.
“Inclusion of skills is handled automatically by WFM, so it’s easier to fill each shift with fewer agents – those who have the requisite specialties to handle every customer encounter,” wrote Ciarlo. “Now, try to achieve the same results with spreadsheets, when each of your agents has 3-5 different skills. How would you even begin to take all of them into account and run various scenarios? Even if it could be done, it would take many, many more hours that could be devoted to other challenges.”
Companies that continue to use manual processes may believe they are saving money, but even a basic cost-benefit analysis would prove otherwise. Manual forecasting and scheduling inevitably leads to overstaffing, which costs organizations money, and understaffing, which costs companies customer goodwill.
No matter how good a manager is at managing a workforce with a spreadsheet, chances are he or she is unable to do a robust enough job to find the kind of process efficiencies that can help the organization improve the quality of customer support they offer while at the same time saving money, and the problem is only compounded when the company experiences growth or seasonal spikes in call volume. For this reason, automated workforce management and scheduling solutions have some of the highest return on investment (ROI) in the call center solutions industry.
As Ciarlo notes in his blog post, workforce management plays a prominent role in engendering employee and customer satisfaction through skill-based scheduling. Spreadsheets simply can’t keep up.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi