Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Inflexible Call Center Schedules are Doomed Call Center Schedules
One of the biggest headaches in contact center operations is getting the balance of capacity right in a way that won’t damage revenue. Sure, if you overschedule agents so one is available at any moment to cater to every customer’s whim, you’ll have really happy customers. You’ll also have bored agents and sky-high labor expenses. On the flip side, if you keep things too lean so you’re never experiencing costly over-capacity, you’ll have frazzled agents and angry customers waiting on long call queues.
So how to find the right balance?
If there was an easy answer, everyone would have perfectly run contact centers. Since this is far from the case, businesses need to find a method for contact center schedule building that works for them and their customers (most of the time…contact center perfection will be along with the next herd of unicorns). Here are some questions to ask yourself when you consider the answer.
At what stage is your business? If you’re brand-building and hoping to acquire a reputation for quality, it’s better to err on the side of over-capacity. You don’t want your brand to immediately usher up an image of long “Your call is valuable to us. Please be patient” queues. On the flip side, if you’re an established brand with high levels of brand loyalty, customers will be a bit more patient about waiting, and a few minutes on hold won’t damage your image for most customers.
Do you have a way to bring extra hands on in an emergency?
Many contact centers build schedules and staff for their average day-to-day operations, but ensure they have more hands available in a pinch, whether it’s in the form of home-based part-time agents who can be up and running quickly, or a third-party company that can begin taking calls at the drop of a hat (or the beep of an alarm from your workforce management solution). This is a great way to build flexibility into your schedule without paying for unused capacity.
Plot your needs visually to better understand your cycles.
The more you understand your contact center’s daily, weekly, monthly and yearly cyclical needs, the better prepared you’ll be to staff it properly and build optimal schedules. Use your historical traffic reports to plot the high and low points, the business cycles, customer responses and trouble spots of the past, which can help you plan better for the future.
Try to control shrinkage by spreading out absenteeism.
While you can’t always predict volume, you can control for things like flu season and vacation time, both of which see lots of absenteeism. For things like training, meetings and vacation time, use your contact center scheduling tool to spread them out during times of lower call volume. To a certain degree, you can even spread call volume out better by coordinating with the marketing and advertising departments to ensure that you’re properly staffed to handle volume from new customer outreach campaigns or sales and specials.
Edited by Maurice Nagle