Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Customer Experience Can Be Tied Directly to Staffing Level Efficiency
The problems businesses run into with staffing are often very apparent to us, particularly at the government and retail levels. Understaffing is easy to spot: it’s the day before Thanksgiving, you’ve got a cart full of groceries, and 35 people are waiting at each cash register line. The employees are so harried, they look like they’re about to spontaneously combust. You’d feel sorrier for them if you could just get your turkey, stuffing mix, cranberry sauce and green beans checked out a little faster.
Overstaffing is also easy to spot. This is when you walk into a deserted clothing store and no fewer than five salespeople pounce on you to ask if they can help you. You’d like to browse on your own, unwatched, but unfortunately, you seem to have acquired a personal shopping team that follows you around the store making suggestions. You think, “Is the $29.99 pair of pants I’m going to buy really going to pay the salaries of these five people for the morning?”
In either case, over-staffing or under-staffing, the customer experience can suffer. Burned out, stressed workers don’t provide good experiences, and neither to bored workers who are unlikely to stay on the job for more than a few weeks.
Unfortunately, it’s sometimes hard to predict exactly what the right staffing levels should be, particularly in the contact center. (It’s not, however, in the supermarket the day before Thanksgiving, so that store has no excuse.) Rather than guessing, all businesses should have a process that takes into account many factors. In the contact center, this means having access to reporting from your telecom platform.
“Unfortunately, staffing level problems aren’t as easy to identify in more behind-the-scenes examples,” wrote Rosy Garcia for Customer Think. “This is where having access to your phone system data and objective metrics becomes imperative.”
A workforce scheduling tool can both increase efficiency and simultaneously lower costs, because they allow you to avoid over-staffing and under-staffing. (Here you can watch a video by Monet Software (News - Alert) explaining how a customer went from 119 agents to 94 agents while maintaining a 98 percent service level using workforce management and scheduling.) With a call center scheduling tool as part of a broader workforce management platform, companies can maximize forecasting, scheduling, agent communication, and adherence to ensure that the right number of employees are working at the right times of day, and on the right channels.
Edited by Maurice Nagle