Call Center Management Featured Article
Workforce Scheduling Is Your Best Insurance For Seasonal and Holiday Call Volume Fluctuations
If your call center's business is cyclical – and whose isn't? – you'll know one of the greatest challenges is to figure out correct staffing levels. Over-staff the contact center and you've got bored agents, plus you're paying lots more in salaries than you need to. Under-staff the contact center, and you've got frazzled, burned out agents (which leads to high turnover) and irritated customers waiting too long in queues. As we've just come off the holidays, chances are you probably learned a few lessons about what worked and what absolutely didn't work in your call center operations.
So how do you approach holidays and seasonal call volume spikes without a sense of dread that keeps you up all night?
The answer to the problem lies in workforce management scheduling, of course. While by now, you've probably gone to a professional workforce management scheduling solution, not all solutions are created equal, and older solutions may be meeting few, if any, of your needs.
In order to meet call demand without under-staffing or over-staffing, you need methods that precisely predicts how many agents are needed to handle the center's contact volume, writes workforce management solutions provider Monet Software in a recent blog post.
Monet cites a 2010 DMG report that identifies the biggest challenges in seasonal forecasting, including:
• The need to forecast for multiple skill sets;
• Changing business needs that negate the usefulness of historical volume data;
• Volume driven by external events, not controlled by the company (i.e., a storm);
• Seasonal volume that varies greatly; and
• Volume patterns that change frequently, making projections difficult.
If you're operating with an older scheduling solution, chances are good that none of these factors can be addressed easily. Monet Software recommends developing “what if” scenarios to explore how a change in call volume or service level goals during a specific day or week would affect your center.
In addition, you can make regular intra-day forecast updates throughout the day, and calculate a new forecast based on what has already occurred to establish trends that will help you in future decisions. (For more information about this, “Intra-day forecasting.”)
While 2012 has been identified as a good year to “get back to basics,” among the basics are ensuring that your call center can meet your customers' most visceral needs properly. Given the damage an improperly staffed call center can do to your operations and your customer satisfaction, today is a great day to begin ensuring that you've always got the right amount of the right kind of staff to meet all your customers' needs.
Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Chris DiMarco