Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Spring and Summer Call Volume and Worker Absenteeism Cause Perfect Storm in Contact Centers
While it may not seem like it in the Northeast U.S. at the moment, warm weather is right around the corner. Spring and summer present peculiar dilemmas for most contact centers: they mean more vacations and holidays by workers, and an uptick in customer activity for many industries, particularly travel, hotel, entertainment and resort destinations.
According to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo, this combination of factors can help create a perfect storm at some contact centers of more calls coming in and less agents there to handle them. Call centers may be used to handling this type of demand during the holidays, but most contact centers have strict “no time off” policies at that time of year, and are often approved for temporary help. In the summer, absenteeism and spikes in call volume aren’t concentrated, but spread out over many months. This makes it harder than ever to predict and staff for.
A robust workforce management solution is therefore critical for warmer months in order to balance workers’ needs for time off for kids out of school for spring or summer break, and family holidays. A modern WFM solution can help predict call volume during uncertain times of the year based on a number of input values.
“When a manager needs to know what type of calls, and call volume, to expect on a certain week or day or even during a particular hour, WFM collects and analyzes historical call data to help predict future workload,” wrote Ciarlo in a recent blog post. “That makes it easier to forecast needs and schedule staff accordingly.”
Additional benefits to using workforce management during times of high volume and variances in employee work schedules include the additional flexibility that is simply not possible with manual scheduling methods, according to Ciarlo. Managers are better equipped to ensure that sudden changes in workers’ schedules won’t negatively affect the quality of customer care.
“This is also a time when the flexible schedule creation made possible by workforce management delivers additional benefits,” he wrote. “Now you can take foreseen and unforeseen variables and agent exceptions into account, as well as make intra-day changes to both forecasting and scheduling.”
While no contact center can eliminate variables, human error or other bumps in the road, a properly managed contact center can reduce the costs (in both quality of service and cash) of overstaffing and understaffing, allowing for more flexibility and better schedule adherence: two concepts that used to be mutually exclusive.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi