Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
WFM Helps Businesses Address Holiday Demands
It’s only mid-September, so it’s hard to believe the holidays are just around the corner. But believe it.
The stores are already stocking holiday décor. And Black Friday (News - Alert) is two months
from Sunday.
To prepare for the higher volume of shoppers, retailers are hiring on seasonal workers to help carry the customer service load.
For example, Gap Inc. is bringing aboard 65,000 seasonal workers. That includes new staffers for its Athleta, Banana Republic, Gap, and Old Navy stores. It also includes additional team members to staff its call centers and distribution facilities.
Clearly, the holiday shopping season calls for more people to help customers purchase goods, get their questions answered so they can go on to buy, and make returns when necessary. The question is, how many new staff members does a business need to hire? And how many people with what skills does that business need during various times?
Answering these questions can be more difficult than it seems. It requires forecasting.
Businesses can use spreadsheets in an effort to try to calculate how many people they need for a particular call center shift, for example. But doing it that way can take a lot of time and lead to imprecise results – meaning understaffing (and poor customer experiences, and stressed call center agents) or overstaffing (and extra call center costs and bored call center agents).
However, workforce management solutions can automatically analyze the broad range of data needed to create precise forecasts, use that information to create schedules, and even measure adherence and do intraday schedule management.
“Workforce management automatically processes all relevant data, particularly call volume histories, to deliver more accurate short-term and long-term forecasting projections,” Monet Software explains in its e-book The Benefits of Workforce Management Explained by My Boss. “By running automated simulations, managers can discover flaws in a forecast and correct them before it’s too late. Excel does not provide that capability.
“Forecasting by call, email and chat type – predicting the types of communication coming in – makes it easier to staff a shift with the agents best qualified to handle them,” the Monet Software (News - Alert) piece adds. “Not possible with Excel, but simple with WFM. Although it may seem obvious how overstaffing affects labor costs (paying agents for doing nothing), understaffing can also negatively impact the contact center and lead to poor customer service and satisfaction, agent burnout and turnover, and missed service levels.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle