Call Center Management Featured Article
September 24, 2009
On Demand Call Center WFM Solutions Reduce Cost and Risk While Simplifying Management
Due to the downturn in the economy, companies everywhere have cut – or are in the process of cutting – staff from their call centers. At the same time, call center managers are being asked to meet or exceed service levels – in essence, to do “more with less.” This pressure to maintain, if not improve customer service comes from the fact that many businesses are now struggling to hold onto what precious few customer they have.
Still, holding down costs is the primary edict -- and as most people know, 70-80 percent of a call center’s operating costs come from labor.
In order to find new efficiencies in the call center, companies are increasingly ditching their spreadsheets and adopting hosted or Web-based workforce management solutions. These systems, with their powerful analytics capabilities, enable call center managers to forecast, with a high degree of accuracy, how many agents will be needed for any given shift – a critical aspect of call center management. This is functionality that spreadsheets simply cannot deliver.
Through integration with the call center’s ACD, the system can extract and analyze historical call data and leverage it to arrive at accurate forecasts of call volume. Similarly, the system can be integrated with a call center’s Web chat and email servers, so that historical data from those channels can be included in the forecasts as well.
In the past, call center workforce management was considered the bastion of the enterprise – most small to medium-sized businesses shied away from it, simply because it was too expensive to deploy on-premises, even more expensive to integrate and maintain (plus many of them figured it was only suitable for large call centers anyway).
But today many WFM vendors are delivering their solutions over the Internet by way of the software-as-a-service model. This greatly reduces the upfront cost of deployment, as there is no need to invest in new hardware, software licenses or network infrastructure. What’s more the SaaS (News - Alert) model enables companies to trial WFM solutions for a short period of time – with very low up-front cost and no commitments. This enables companies to improve call center management without the capital investment, IT resources and long and painful implementation times.
With SaaS, you can “try before you buy” a WFM solution. Today’s hosted solutions can be live in a few days, allowing companies to realize the benefits after a couple of weeks – something traditional software cannot offer.
Monet Software is a leading provider of Web-based WFM solutions for small and medium-sized call centers. Its WFM Live offering enables effective call center management through its ability to accurately forecast call volume and effectively schedule, and manage the performance of, call center agents. This, in turn, results in increased service levels and reduced payroll costs.
For more information, visit the company’s newly-redesigned Website at www.monetsoftware.com.
Still, holding down costs is the primary edict -- and as most people know, 70-80 percent of a call center’s operating costs come from labor.
In order to find new efficiencies in the call center, companies are increasingly ditching their spreadsheets and adopting hosted or Web-based workforce management solutions. These systems, with their powerful analytics capabilities, enable call center managers to forecast, with a high degree of accuracy, how many agents will be needed for any given shift – a critical aspect of call center management. This is functionality that spreadsheets simply cannot deliver.
Through integration with the call center’s ACD, the system can extract and analyze historical call data and leverage it to arrive at accurate forecasts of call volume. Similarly, the system can be integrated with a call center’s Web chat and email servers, so that historical data from those channels can be included in the forecasts as well.
In the past, call center workforce management was considered the bastion of the enterprise – most small to medium-sized businesses shied away from it, simply because it was too expensive to deploy on-premises, even more expensive to integrate and maintain (plus many of them figured it was only suitable for large call centers anyway).
But today many WFM vendors are delivering their solutions over the Internet by way of the software-as-a-service model. This greatly reduces the upfront cost of deployment, as there is no need to invest in new hardware, software licenses or network infrastructure. What’s more the SaaS (News - Alert) model enables companies to trial WFM solutions for a short period of time – with very low up-front cost and no commitments. This enables companies to improve call center management without the capital investment, IT resources and long and painful implementation times.
With SaaS, you can “try before you buy” a WFM solution. Today’s hosted solutions can be live in a few days, allowing companies to realize the benefits after a couple of weeks – something traditional software cannot offer.
Monet Software is a leading provider of Web-based WFM solutions for small and medium-sized call centers. Its WFM Live offering enables effective call center management through its ability to accurately forecast call volume and effectively schedule, and manage the performance of, call center agents. This, in turn, results in increased service levels and reduced payroll costs.
For more information, visit the company’s newly-redesigned Website at www.monetsoftware.com.
Patrick Barnard is a contributing writer for TMCnet. To read more of Patrick’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Patrick Barnard