Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
How to Assess Effective Call Center Scheduling
Whether you’re a call center manager, a high school administrator, or a small business owner, you know that assigning schedules – and managing changes related to them – can be a real hassle.
The good news is that workforce management tools can now do a lot of the work for call center operators. Then the question becomes how do you measure your success in creating those schedules.
Well, there are a couple of key ways to do that.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that one way has to do with internal metrics and the other with customer satisfaction.
Call centers and contact centers have always been keenly focused on meeting key performance indicators or metrics. So many of these organizations schedule with their own KPIs in mind.
However, in the age of the always-on and more entitled customer, call centers and contact centers should also set schedules based on customer outcomes. And that should include ensuring there are adequate agents ready to address their needs, and that they match agent skills to customer requests and call volumes. (During higher-volume times, more experienced and skilled agents are needed.)
Providing agents with more flexibility in the shifts they work, their break times, and their ability to swap shifts with colleagues can also be important to drive employee engagement. And when employees are engaged they tend to stay longer, gain more experience, and have the know-how and initiative to better service customers. So that ties into customer satisfaction as well.
Modern workforce management solutions can help enable that flexibility, measurement, and ease of schedule creation.
Edited by Maurice Nagle