Scheduling and Social Media Top of List for Call Centers in 2014

We’re less than a month away from a new year, and a new year will bring with it new technologies, new processes and new methods. For the contact center, the technological shift we’ve seen will continue into 2014, and we’ll see more and more centers using social media, as well as other channels to help their customer base.

Customers right now are savvier than ever. They rely on mobile devices and applications to perform just about every function from social to personal - to work. When it comes to the places they choose to do business with, whether it’s purchasing goods or services, customers aren’t just picking up the phone and waiting in a queue. They want instant connection and they want it now.

It is up to the contact center to arm themselves with agents who are ready, in addition to the latest technologies to help their employees solve customer issues in a timely fashion. Outlets like Twitter (News - Alert) and Facebook have offered the customer an instant connection, so it is imperative that call and contact center managers have agents ready to answer inquiries in an instant.  

One way to help navigate the complex sea of contact technologies is through proper call center scheduling. Running a successful call center or help desk requires getting the right number of agents in place at precisely the right times. Staffing too many call center agents needlessly drives up costs and staffing too few agents at peak times causes your service level to suffer and shift swaps can be difficult to track without the right solution.

2014 should be the year that contact centers embrace not only the social channels available, but the proper scheduling solutions so that they are staffed to be available on every channel possible.

Manual approaches to scheduling staff are not only huge time sinks, they leave call center owners vulnerable to costly mistakes that undermine profitability and operations. Every call and customer interaction means money, so every call center manager should implement a best practices guideline when it comes to staffing their call centers to maintain service levels.

Call and contact centers are aware of the social media customer experience, but too many still do not support a social customer service channel. 2014 is looking like it is in the hands of the customer, so contact centers need to get with the times and not only look to filling their centers with the most up to date technologies, but employ call center scheduling solutions to use these technologies to their full advantage. 

Edited by Stefania Viscusi