Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Too Many Contact Centers Falling Behind with Forecasting and Schedule Adherence
Call center managers have a lot on their plate. They need to hire and train new agents, and ensure the continued education of existing agents. They need to listen to calls, review performance and make decisions about which employees should be working in which channels. They need to attend to new technology (and train workers on it) and be accountable for the contact center’s overall performance. One of their most critical tasks, however, is scheduling and forecasting. Some large contact centers have managers entirely devoted to these two functions. In smaller companies, it often falls on the overburdened shoulders of general contact center managers.
In recent years, the tasks of forecasting has become somewhat easier thanks to technology and new ideas for success. Companies are beginning to realize precisely how important a good forecast is to the success or failure of a contact center’s efforts, and that it’s closely tied to the overall customer experience.
“Forecasting determines many of the daily decisions made by contact center management, and plays a key role in a center’s ability to operate efficiently and deliver quality customer service,” according to a recent infographic based on a survey conducted by workforce optimization solution provider Monet Software (News - Alert). Survey respondents were evenly split between using an automated workforce management and scheduling solution, and those that still use manual methods, such as spreadsheets.
Forecasts rely on historical information, plus any new data from future plans (a launch, a new marketing campaign, a weather-related delay, etc.). For historical call volume data, companies should be relying on several years’ worth of information: two to five years, ideally. The Monet survey found, however, that at contact centers where products and promotions are constantly changing, managers rely on just 12 to 18 months for forecast creation. For this (and other) reasons, the accuracy rates of many forecasts in the contact center today aren’t so great: the average contact center sees accuracy variances of between five and 20 percent.
To produce a great forecast that allows a contact center to perform to its highest standards, forecasts need more data, schedule adherence needs to be higher, and managers need to be able to schedule shorter intervals in order to be able to respond to daily changes that might affect the schedule and adherence to it.
“All forecasts also rely on agents being in the right place at the right time,” according to the infographic by Monet. “As this doesn’t always happen, contact centers have learned to build more flexibility into their forecasts. This is much easier to do with an automated workforce management solution.”
Workforce management and scheduling solutions built for twenty-first century contact centers can take advantage of technology advances to build better schedules, use more data for forecasting, take advantage of easy features that allow for intra-day adjustments and communicate the schedule’s demands to agents in a way that improves agent adherence. These tasks, which are all but impossible with manual workforce management and scheduling methods, can pave the way for better employee engagement, better customer engagement and room to grow and take advantage of business opportunities.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi