Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Call Center Schedule Becomes a Living, Breathing Entity with Intraday Management
When it comes to the contact center, it’s well known that scheduling is a critical task. Schedules allow contact centers to ensure that the call center is not understaffed, which can damage customer relationships and burn out agents, or overstaffed, which is an unnecessary expense. Many contact center managers are good at building schedules, but these schedules often go awry due to unforeseen events during the day.
The call center is reliant on both humans and technology, both of which can make errors. Employees can get sick during the day and ask to leave, and systems or telecom outages can disrupt the flow of calls. Current events (a storm, an error in marketing materials) can cause call volume to soar. A training session that runs too long can also make a mess out of a carefully crafted schedule, according to workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software.
“Sometimes, despite accurate forecasting techniques, a forecast or schedule drafted in the morning can go astray by the afternoon,” wrote Monet. “A mid-day forecast update can identify trends and adjust schedules accordingly.”
The concept is called intraday management, and it allows managers to continually adjust and refine the schedule as necessary, ensuring that the call center is properly covered with manpower regardless of what changes from the time the schedule was first created.
With a proper workforce optimization solution that allows for intraday management, call center managers can be alerted when actual call volume starts differing from the call volume predicted by forecast methodologies. This allows managers to bring more agents online (or send some home), and move scheduled items such as breaks and training sessions to adjust the schedule accordingly.
These solutions provide the initial agent requirements based on historical call information and trending analysis as well as service level objectives. Agent requirements can be displayed in 15-minute intervals along with projected occupancy rates. They also allow managers to run simulations and play various “what-if” scenarios to help predict what would happen under certain circumstances.
Proper scheduling and forecasting are critical to the operations of any contact center that wishes to maintain a high standard of customer support. This process begins with an accurate forecast of call volumes. But without the ability to adjust the schedule throughout the day, these forecasts can become more of a burden than a boon. Intraday management is critical for adherence for any contact center that hopes to keep its metrics high.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi