Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
A Good Contact Center 'Salad' Starts with Great Produce
Once upon a time, there was a tradition in call centers that “any warm body to fill a chair” would do. After all, most people can answer telephone calls and read. One agent leaves for a job that pays 25 cents more per hour? There are plenty more where that agent came from. Hiring managers had resumes galore, and when agents exited the revolving door that was the call center, more came in. Get ‘em hired, get ‘em trained and stick a headset on them. Right?
Fast-forward to the era of omnichannel customer engagement and the customer experience, and it seems like a silly business model. Not everyone is suited for contact center work, and it doesn’t matter how great a trainer you are or how user-friendly your desktop solutions are. In a recent Forbes’ article, Micah Solomon likened this practice to making a salad out of lousy produce: There’s just no amount of dressing you can pile on top that can ever compensate for skimping on the essential ingredients. The essential ingredients are, of course, people who are ideally suited for customer service work.
“Company after company overlooks the necessity of finding employees who are inclined and equipped to work face to face (or terminal to terminal) with customers,” wrote Solomon. “This shortsightedness grows from the extreme urgency of business life, the feeling that customer-facing positions need to be filled now, by whomever is breathing and in the neighborhood, so that the phones get answered and customers get served, no matter how imperfectly. This is an understandable impulse even though, by and large, it’s better to let that phone ring a little longer than to hire ill-equipped employees to answer it poorly,” he said.
Even when you have great workers hired and trained (Solomon recommends using the acronym “WETCO,” or warmth, empathy, teamwork, conscientiousness and optimism during the hiring process) it’s important to remember that contact center work encompasses a lot of skills beyond being patient and empathetic. There are foreign language skills and upselling skills. There are “angry customer de-escalation” experts, product and service experts, tech people, warranty specialists and those who might have a special gift for communicating with elderly customers, for example, or Millennials.
It’s the job of call center scheduling professionals to ensure that the right people with the right skills are available at the right times, but as the number of skills proliferates, it becomes a nearly impossible task to do manually. This is where modern workforce optimization comes in with automated tools that help managers build schedules according to customers’ anticipated needs. These solutions are flexible, so if any one factor changes, the schedule can be redone quickly and efficiently to cover the gap. (Try doing that with a spreadsheet.)
By hiring properly, you can minimize gaps in the first place to ensure that all your agents are well-suited to speak to your valuable customers. Technology can help fill those final gaps, and ensure that your hand-picked pool of professional agents is being deployed to the best of their best abilities.