Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Scheduling Benefits of Virtual Contact Centers
Increasingly, contact centers aren’t centers at all. Rather than being a physical facility, they may actually be a workforce of people located in remote locations tied together by technology such as telephony, collaboration and the various desktop solutions they use to do their jobs. There is evidence that this arrangement benefits both employees and employers: companies can save the money on physical premises and pull from a larger talent pool. Employees can save the costs and time on commuting, work from their own homes and have better work/life balance.
This isn’t to say it isn’t challenging. It can become harder to manage and schedule workers when they’re not all in one place, particularly without the right technologies. Building an ideal schedule is both an art and a science, and unless some tasks are automated, managers will spend all their time ensuring the calls (or other media contacts) are adequately covered.
Today, modern workforce management and scheduling solutions can go a long way toward ensuring success for virtual contact centers, according to a recent blog post by Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert).
“Whether all your agents are in the same room or working from homes and offices throughout the U.S., the ability to create accurate forecasts and schedules to achieve adequate staffing levels remains vital,” wrote Ciarlo.
It’s also important to point out that there are upsides to remote agents when it comes to scheduling. While it’s unreasonable to call an agent back to work after he or she has arrived home – particularly if the contact center isn’t reimbursing for gas and travel time – it’s not difficult to ask an employee to log on from home for an extra hour after his or her shift has ended. The employee may even appreciate the extra hour for financial reasons.
“In a virtual situation, managers sometimes have the luxury of more flexibility, which creates additional part-time and split-shift opportunities,” wrote Ciarlo. “But sometimes more options can also mean more headaches. Workforce management software automates these tasks so they get done faster and with greater precision.”
To keep workers more engaged with their jobs – and this may be harder when employees are not physically together -- many companies are turning to solutions that are simply more appealing to use. This has given rise to the concept of “gamification,” which is increasingly making its way into the contact center.
“Studies have shown that gamification – redesigning everyday routines and tasks to be more game-like and interactive, results in a work experience that is more engaging, more fun, and (hopefully) more productive,” wrote Ciarlo. “As a motivating technique, this is even more important when agents are outside an office where other direct means of support and encouragement are not present.”
Many companies have made the virtual contact center model work for them. Jet Blue Airlines, for example, uses nothing but home-based agents, and the company has some of the best customer support in the airline industry. It’s vital, however, to ensure that your underpinning technologies support good workforce management, scheduling and employee engagement.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi