Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
What is 'Self-Scheduling' in the Contact Center?
Traditionally, call center scheduling solutions have been built with numbers in mind rather than people. But call centers are made of people, so inflexible scheduling solutions that don’t acknowledge that can often run afoul of human problems. Contact center solutions provider Calabrio (News - Alert) believes it has the answer: a “self-scheduling” technology that supports the company’s workforce management solution. The goal of the new feature is to combine planning optimization, intraday automation and agent self-scheduling to benefit both agents and contact center performance, according to the company. The new technology was enabled by Calabrio’s June 2019 acquisition of Teleopti.
Self-Scheduling is available to both cloud and on-premise customers and accessible to agents via mobile app or on their desktops.
Calabrio noted that while the concept of self-service for shift preferences, overtime or time-off is not new, the company’s self-scheduling feature marks the first time that agents have the power to manage their own schedules as events happen during the day (so they can, for example, take lunch with a co-worker on a slow afternoon without negatively affecting service levels).
Agents more in control of their own schedules are more engaged workers, which reflects positively on the quality of customer support they provide. Algorithms automatically check staffing levels against key performance indicators (KPI), service level agreements (SLA) and skills requirements, while permission-based parameters allow managers to set non-overwritable activities.
“Self-Scheduling introduces new levels of flexibility that give employees the freedom to focus on delivering exceptional customer service while helping to reduce harmful attrition rates that rack up recruitment and onboarding costs for businesses,” said Magnus Geverts, VP of product marketing and management at Calabrio, in a statement. “It’s the critical next step toward realizing our goal of humanizing the workplace.”
Reducing the demand on resource planners and managers for intraday monitoring and request-handling gives them the freedom to focus on higher-level tasks and customer experience objectives. Managers and planners can remain in control of their contact center environment at all times, but with heightened flexibility and less manual monitoring, according to Calabrio.
Edited by Maurice Nagle