Workforce Management Featured Article

Cloud-based Workforce Management Is the Best of All Worlds for Small Non-profit Contact Centers

In the contact center business, there are few things more important than scheduling and forecasting. Without a good schedule based on a number of factors including historical data, a contact center would never know how many people to put on the phone. Overstaffing leads to high costs and bored agents, and understaffing leads to frazzled employees, long wait times and dissatisfied customers. Neither are ideal to a company that hopes to retain customers or help callers.

While most contact centers, from the smallest to the largest, would agree that scheduling and forecasting are challenges, the fallout from problems with either is felt more strongly in small organizations, which have far fewer resources to cope with sudden call spikes or an agent or agents calling in sick, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo.

“Forecasting and scheduling is often more challenging in smaller call centers than in larger centers because the performance, adherence and absenteeism of every agent has more impact,” wrote Ciarlo, using small, non-profit credit unions as an example of the type of organization that could be most affected. “In this situation, a more accurate forecast, a more flexible schedule and increased schedule adherence become even more important,” he notes.

The Catch-22 is that smaller organizations such as credit unions don’t often believe they have the funds to invest in a modern workforce management solution, or they don’t think that such a solution could help them. Many small organizations still believe that workforce optimization only comes in large, expensive premise-based packages that only the most cash-flush companies can afford.

The truth is that today’s cloud-based workforce optimization solutions, which don’t require much capital outlay up front (unlike premise-based solutions), are ideal for smaller contact centers and non-profit organizations. They can help them make the best of the resources they have, and substantially lessen the pain of unforeseen events. (Monet offers a case study regarding how the company’s WFM Live solution helped Texas-based credit union GECU.)

While most small contact centers choose cloud-based workforce management solutions for financial reasons – they simply don’t have the capital for premise-based solutions – they usually find a host of other benefits follow, including short deployment time, advanced features formerly available only to the largest of companies, and expanded options to use remote or home-based workers. Overall, a cloud-based WFM solution can help a small company compete better and stand out in the crowd.