Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
'The Most Wonderful Time of the Year' to Wreck Contact Center Schedules is Coming - Are You Ready?
It’s the “most wonderful time of the year” again. While it’s too early for Christmas carols, customer support departments are feeling the autumn weather, and anticipating the holiday headaches to come. With about eight weeks to go before “Black Friday (News - Alert),” or the day after Thanksgiving when most people begin their holiday shopping (as well as its close twin, Cyber Monday), contact centers across North America are already in hiring mode to onboard temporary workers so they can meet customer demands. It’s not, and never has been, an easy task.
For starters, all the usual call traffic patterns are thrown off beginning in mid-November. Customers who are largely predictable during the rest of the year become highly unpredictable during the holiday season. (They may have to wait until odd times to call, for example, so their gift ideas aren’t leaked to the household.) Special offers, deals and campaigns created by the marketing department to maximize holiday buying may also throw an unexpected wrench in the works. While using last year’s historical data to craft work schedules for a new holiday season may help, it won’t be a cure-all for the unpredictability.
At these times, call center managers need a way to build schedules that are reliable as possible based on all the data they have, and more importantly, they need to be able to make changes to those schedules when information changes (and it will change often). Bringing temporary or home-based workers onto the staff for the holidays is a great way to ensure better coverage and adherence, but it complicates the creation of schedules by orders of magnitude. November is the beginning of cold and flu season as well as hurricane season, both of which can cause mortal damage to scheduling. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, companies described the steps they are taking to insulate their supply chains from disarray that might result from strong storms carried by the expected strong El Niño weather pattern for 2015/2016. These storms often result in power outages, flooding, delivery delays, out-of-stock product and a spike in service calls, all of which are highly relevant to the contact center.
Scared yet? It’s good to be a little scared. Companies that don’t plan for the future are bound to fail in the present, particularly with customers. To ensure that holidays, sickness and weather don’t derail customer support efforts, companies today should be working with the most detail-oriented and flexible scheduling solutions possible. Because it’s a stressful season for contact center agents, too, it’s important to choose a solution that allows them to have some control over their schedules. Chances are good that overtime work will be available, and a scheduling solution that allows workers to bid on overtime (or time off) during the holiday rush based on some preset criteria (seniority, for example) is an important element of maintaining a fair management approach. In addition, using a cloud-based solution is ideal if a contact center plans to bring in home-based or remote workers to pick up the extra slack. By building a strong “virtual” contact center schedule that ensures customers are covered and service levels are met regardless of where agents are located is a great way to alleviate the coming holiday season headaches.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi