Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Improving Call Center Scheduling Accuracy with Advanced Reporting Capabilities
Call center managers generally have their hands full with a never-ending list of duties. One of the most important, however, is building schedules for the days and weeks to come. While there are a lot of methods that can be used to do this, the desired outcome is the same: forecasting call and other contact volume, determining the number of agents needed (and the skills required) and building a schedule that will most closely serve the needs of the day.
As with many processes, the more data and intelligence the manager has, the better. According to Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software, optimal resource scheduling requires accurate forecasting of work volume and staff requirements. Workforce management software can help make it easier to specify shift patterns and daily duties, and factor in the skill sets and preferences of individual agents. This ensures that the contact center is properly covered for all incoming customer calls, e-mails and other contact media.
This information – historical and otherwise – should be available to managers in the form of reports, according to Ciarlo. But this isn’t always the case.
“If your system is not delivering the information you need, or is providing that data in a way that is difficult to decipher, it might be time to consider a new WFM solution,” he wrote. “This is particularly important since the responsibility of WFM does not end with the production of an accurate schedule.”
While most workforce management solutions help managers build schedules, it’s important to ask what else the solutions can do. Reporting is a critical function, and good reports can help managers make better scheduling and forecasting decisions in the future.
At the bare minimum, a solution should provide an “hours worked” report, or a breakdown and summary of assigned activities that allows managers to balance multiple types of work and address backlog issues. Combined with an agent status report, the hours worked report can offer insight into workload distribution and productivity.
But one of the most critical reporting elements is the service performance report, which can help contact center managers understand how actual performance compared to projections and expectations. It’s this report that helps uncover gaps in training, hiring and employee performance. Managers can target poorly performing individuals or teams for better training, or can drill down to root causes of a breakdown in processes, identify it and eliminate it.
Improving a contact center’s forecasting and scheduling abilities is a noble pursuit, and should always be top-of-mind for any contact center manager. Without the right data – and that comes from reporting – it’s something of a futile task, however.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi