Workforce Management Featured Article
Effective Workforce Management and Scheduling Boosts Service Levels and Suppresses Costs
Call centers are facing something of a conundrum today. Customers have higher standards and less patience when it comes to waiting for service or waiting for an answer. They’re also more willing to defect to competitors if they don’t get the service they expect. Many companies whose products and services are commoditized by the Internet are able to differentiate themselves only by the quality of service they provide.
Yet on the flip side, contact centers are facing budgets that haven’t grown much. Companies are keeping an eye on their profit margins in a sluggish economy, so the possibility of overstaffing in order to ensure that customers never need wait for an answer is out of the question. Technology budgets are also constrained, so companies have to try and make more out of less, forever under pressure to improve customer outcomes.
What this means is that contact centers have their work cut out for them. They are facing the need to ensure that every call is answered promptly by someone who can affect the kind of first-call resolution customer’s demand. Smart companies are turning to their workforce management and scheduling solutions to meet these seemingly conflicting mandates, according to workforce management and call recording solutions provider Monet Software.
“More accurate forecasting, flexible scheduling and real-time adherence will make your daily call center management more effective by avoiding under or over staffing and ensuring agents are working when they are needed, directly resulting in improved service levels,” according to the company on its TMCnet Community.
Today’s cloud-based workforce management, forecasting and scheduling solutions are affordable and easy to use and include ACD integration, real-time agent adherence and intra-day management, allowing contact centers to determine precisely the staffing levels they needs to meet customer demand, without going into costly over-staffing. Thanks to the fast implementation time inherent to cloud-based solutions, call centers can begin improving service levels and reducing center costs within days, all without the upfront expenses and IT requirements of traditional software.
These solutions are particularly compelling for small to medium-sized businesses that cannot afford large premise-based installations. They can take advantage of newer features without the high costs, essentially accomplishing two seemingly contradictory tasks: boosting the quality of service while keeping costs low.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi