Four Questions to Ask Hosted Call Center Workforce Management Products

According to officials of Monet Software, as a small or medium-sized call center "you might think you can get by with scheduling and managing your staff using spreadsheets. Maybe you have avoided workforce management software because of the large upfront investment that is associated with traditional premised based WFM software vendors." Yep, that'd be a good reason to avoid them.

However, Monet officials say, with new subscription-based and fully hosted offerings "you might ask yourself, if continuing to use spreadsheets is the best or lowest cost choice. You need to keep in mind that inefficient forecasts and schedules will cost your center every day."

To bring the point home, they offer a list of the following questions and see if you might discover an opportunity for improvement in your center:

First off, can you monitor and track schedule adherence? If agents are out of adherence for 15 minutes each day in a 25 agent center, that can add up to staffing costs of $23,000 per year.

And can you take advantage of your call history? The use of detailed call history data and patterns might help you improve accuracy of your forecast and your schedule.

Can you "build-in" skill-based routing into your schedule? Having multi-skill agents in overlapping groups as part of your schedule will help improve productivity.

And finally, how do you handle exceptions and agent preferences? The ability to handle exceptions and personal preferences as part of your schedule will motivate your team.

Last month TMC had Monet's call center resolutions for 2011. It’s certainly the time of year for resolutions, but thankfully that’ll be over, and the crowds at the gym will thin out to normal size soon enough. Officials of Monet Software are concerned that you maybe haven’t been as diligent as you probably should have been with the new year’s resolutions for your call center, the ones that don’t involve chocolate, that third glass of wine or being nice to morons. So they’ve agreed to help you out a bit.

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Jennifer Russell