Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Call Center Scheduling: Efficiently Staffing Your Call Center
The call center is rife with changing workloads and fluctuating staffing needs. When it comes to properly staffing the call center, there are so many variables to consider that aren’t exclusive to agent availability and accurately predicting call volume. There’s skill sets to keep in mind, what kind of calls you’ll receive and when, customer initiatives, response time, call quality and so on. It’s enough to overwhelm any manager, which is why there are a few items to think about before scheduling your call center’s needs.
Traditional call center scheduling principles include laying the proper foundation, building upon schedules, managing peaks and valleys of call volumes and implementing the proper staffing needs from there. In the call center, time is money. When it comes down to the task of scheduling work shifts for your call center representatives, efficiency means that there’s less time doling out schedules and more time focusing on what makes call centers tick: the customer.
Call centers must reign in labor expenses in order to maintain economic feasibility in their highly competitive market. It’s actually surprising how many call centers have yet to bring their complex shift scheduling management out of the dark ages.
According to Monet Software, keep it simple and focus on your agents, matching their personalities to each other and hire agents that are multi-skilled. In this instance, multi-skilled means that an agent can handle an array of calls and not be specific to one particular issue or customer. A multi-skilled agent can tackle a host of different types of calls, resulting in productivity gains.
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.
Monet suggests implementing a flexible shift model, monitor shrinkage so that barely any time is lost and keep your top talent by ranking your agents according to their skill set. These tips, along with a many others, are just a few simple items to consider when navigating the confusing waters of call center scheduling.
With the right call center scheduling plan in place, the ability to focus on the customer and drive more sales means success, no matter the size of the company.
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Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli