Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Workforce Optimization for the Hospitality Contact Center
In most industries, the contact center is the only front for customer support. The hospitality industry, along with the rest of the travel sector, faces a unique challenge in that it’s necessary to blend contact center and digital customer support with in-person customer care. Hospitality is one of the most competitive industries in the world when it comes to winning and keeping customers, and few hotels can afford to make even a single misstep with customers.
Workforce optimization technology can go a long way toward ensuring the customer support framework is structured properly to eliminate weak spots. It’s particularly critical in an industry in which customers – travelers – often require assistance in the middle of the night, or during distressing events such as flight cancellations.
“Call center travel agents and airlines customer service centers may receive hundreds – even thousands – of calls in a day, from frantic business travelers and families taking the one vacation a year they can afford, and praying that nothing goes wrong,” according to a recent white paper by workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert). “That’s why it is so important for hospitality contact centers to provide outstanding customer service – this is where hotel reservations are made or changed, tours are scheduled, rental cars are booked and once-in-a-lifetime memories are arranged.”
For this reason, adequate agent staffing for travel contact centers is critical, and it’s built on a foundation of accurate forecasts and schedules. When these tasks are done right, hospitality customer service managers know they will have adequate staffing to handle all incoming calls efficiently. At the heart of accurate forecasts and schedules is data, which needs to be correctly managed by a robust analytics engine designed for workforce optimization, not the limited kind generated through spreadsheets that cannot accommodate last minute changes, but the more detailed, real-time data that is only possible with a workforce optimization solution.
A hospitality contact center’s needs can change quickly based on weather problems, airline schedule delays, emergencies, current events or security issues. A schedule created yesterday may become inadequate at a moment’s notice, and manually generated schedules cannot be scaled up quickly – and communicated to the people who need to know about the changes – in a logical and data-driven way.
An automated workforce optimization solution can help a hospitality call center achieve best practices in forecasting, scheduling, adherence tracking and agent productivity, according to Monet. It can also offer critical features such as real-time adherence – so managers can know when the schedule needs adjustment or metrics are departing from the norm – exception planning so the contact center is better prepared for unexpected events, and intraday management for better flexibility.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi