Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Call Center Scheduling Technology Improves Agent Productivity
Schedule adherence is one of the key challenges for call centers. Companies that offer call center scheduling solutions must understand that increasing schedule adherence has a huge cost saving and efficiency potential, but customers need the right tools to better track all agent activities to get to the next level.
Knowlagent's intraday management solution RightTime is being rolled out to all of Rogers Communication's contact centers to improve call center scheduling. Rogers is using RightTime to take advantage of agent downtime delivering more training, coaching, communications during idle time.
RightTime allows telecommunications companies to meet the challenge of communicating time-sensitive and complex information to their agents effectively in order to provide the best customer service possible. The need to have highly knowledgeable agents is often at odds with call center scheduling pressures to maintain service levels. RightTime provides the ability to get essential information to agents without negatively impacting service levels or incurring the additional headcount costs of scheduling updates to occur in shrinkage.
After a successful deployment in one of its sites in Ottawa, Rogers has moved forward with implementing the technology across all of its contact centers. In just three weeks, Rogers saw a significant impact on first call resolution (FCR) due to increased speed and efficiency of training delivery. Each agent completed, on average, nearly nine courses in 10 weeks, which reduced costs and minimized the impact to service compared to the alternative of hard-scheduling the sessions to occur in the same time period.
"Rogers Communications (News - Alert) is known for innovating to meet its customers' needs," said Matt McConnell, chief executive officer for Knowlagent. "Making use of previously unproductive idle time to focus on improving customer experience gives the company a sustainable engine for maintaining its edge in the quality of care delivered by its call center agents."
By integrating with automatic call distributors, RightTime is able to redistribute wait time intervals so agents can complete off-phone work from a task list during idle time, transforming this time into Active Wait Time resulting in improved agent productivity.
Another provider of call center scheduling solutions, Monet Software, is seeing some major trends in the call center industry based on new emerging technologies. The Internet has become critical for businesses to successfully manage business operations and agents are monitoring social media channels to connect with customers and prospects.
The adoption of cloud-based software is accelerating because it is scalable, secure, affordable, and easily implemented. Customers want a fully integrated WFO solution, like Monet’s, to take advantage of synergies across multiple functions.
Chuck Ciarlo at Monet said, “Call centers tell us, they want to move from a reactive to proactive mode of operation. They want to proactively set goals, KPI (key performance indicators), triggers, alerts, and instant notifications to further optimize resources and improve efficiencies.”
Edited by Rich Steeves