Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Coping With Special Scheduling Circumstances in the Call Center
Forecasting in a call center is as much an art as a science. Many workforce management solutions today let you build largely fool-proof schedules for your call center if your calls are steady and volume fluctuates minimally to moderately.
Where many solutions fall down, however, is in “special day” forecasting: a holiday, an internal training day, the day a special marketing campaign drops, or during an unusual weather event, for example. The Fourth of July is a terrific example: it’s a holiday that happens once a year, but can fall on any day of the week.
For starters, it’s important to analyze your call volume for previous and similar periods: the previous Fourth of July is the best place to start. Make sure you take into factor any growth your call center has experienced since the previous year, but you’ll need to pay special attention to the day of the week. A Fourth of July that occurs on Monday may look very different in terms of volume than a Fourth of July that happens on Friday.
Next, you must be able to accurately predict daily and interval call volume. This can be done by your workforce management solution, but only if your solution is able to break down the forecast into not only regular, expected intervals, but it should also be able to calculate the "special day" effect.
Another critical element of coping with special days is having the ability to do intra-day forecasting and scheduling. It’s important to pay special attention to call volume on “different” days such as holidays or days following unusual marketing activity. When you notice that the actual call volume is different from the forecast, you should be able to easily analyze the deviation and trend lines for both call volume and average handle time, and make changes accordingly by recalculating the forecast for each interval, based on the new information. When you’ve determined your needs, then you can make adjustments accordingly to accommodate the new schedule. These adjustments usually come in the form of changing breaks, lunch periods or training. It might mean offering some overtime to agents, or finding a few agents willing to go home. If you have home agents on call, you might find that having some of them log-in earlier – or later – would help you accommodate your new schedule.
Finally, it’s important to uncover the causes of the deviation and learn from them. It will help you not only prepare for the next set of “special circumstances,” it might even help you be able to predict it.
Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Patrick Barnard