Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
How to Make the Best of Your Top Agents with Scheduling and Incentives
As a contact center manager, you know that there are certain times of the day or the week that are the hardest to cope with. Whether it’s Friday afternoon, Monday morning or something in between, there is at least one multi-hour period that challenges even your sharpest managerial skills. Crossing your fingers and hoping for the best isn’t going to cut it, so what are some steps you can take to ensure coverage and a high-quality customer experience during these rush hours?
Use Your Best Agents
The busy shifts aren’t the best time to break in new agents or give the stragglers one more chance to pick up their performance. Don’t be shy about using your best and most experienced agents during peak times. Many of the best agents will prefer “busy shifts” since it helps the time pass more quickly than the dull, slow time periods. Save the on-the-job learning for slower periods.
Employ Skilling
“Skilling” is taking stock of agents’ strengths and weaknesses, and ensuring you’re using their strong features and avoiding their weak spots. If Monday mornings bring a litany of complaints from customers, build your schedule in such a way that agents with de-escalation skills are on the phone, NOT the agents who have shown to have short fuses with rude customers in the past. If the calls are getting technical, you want the agents with the best product knowledge working. Your scheduling solution should include skilling capabilities.
Include All Agent Activities in the Schedule
Some workforce management processes account only for calls, not other contacts such as email, social media and text. If agents are spending time doing any of these activities, be sure that your workforce management and scheduling solution can handle the omnichannel customer support approach. Monet Software’s (News - Alert) advanced staffing and scheduling engine incorporates all call types and other activities to generate staffing schedules that optimize a wide range of factors – agent availability, expected call volume, service level goals and center budget.
Put Some Incentives in Place
If you’re going to use your best agents at your most challenging times, there should be something in it for them. Introduce a host of incentive schemes for peak times and difficult customers to keep agents motivated, so that they actually have something to gain from their hard work. You can do this with a customized incentive plan and offer benefits such as first picks of overtime, days off or vacation, or you can do it with a “gamified” workforce management and scheduling solution that allows top performers to earn “brownie points” within the application for doing a good job.
Your skilled and experienced agents are your best asset. Be sure to use their abilities to the utmost in your scheduling process. At the same time, however, ensure they feel adequately rewarded and not taken advantage of.
Edited by Maurice Nagle