Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
For Better Call Center Schedules, Draw Data from Outside the Contact Center
The call center has come a long way with technology, not only in the addition of new channels such as social media and mobile app, and the adoption of twenty-first century tools such as data and speech analytics, but also in tried-and-true functions such as workforce management and scheduling.
While it’s true that many centers still use manual scheduling processes, a healthy portion of call centers today use modern workforce management and scheduling solutions that offer them unprecedented levels of flexibility and functionality.
In its recently published 14th Annual UK Contact Centre Decision-Maker's Guide 2014, research group ContactBabel (News - Alert) and report sponsor Intradiem uncovered some trends in contact center performance, operations and technology within UK contact center operations. The study was based on questionnaires completed by 215 contact center managers and directors between June and August of this year.
It reveals that workforce management and scheduling are finding a broader place in organizations, spreading out even from the contact center to include many other related functions.
“Workforce management is increasingly being used as part of an overall quality or performance optimization suite, which can include quality monitoring, HR management and training as well as the traditional workforce management forecasts and schedules, as all of these factors affect each other,” wrote the report’s authors. “For example, understanding when and how other departments will be operating means that workforce management tools can be used to forecast and schedule accordingly (e.g. about a new TVadvert).”
In addition, according to the report, this broader view of scheduling and workforce management allows managers to ensure agents are well prepared for events that originate outside the contact center. Imagine a new initiative by marketing that agents need to understand and grasp quickly so they can successfully handle calls related to the initiative.
“Contact center management is able to brief agents -- via a desktop broadcast if at short notice -- about the correct responses and issues, as well as changing IVR prompts and messages to provide answers to the more simple answers, as well as managing agent skill-sets for relevant call groups,” according to the report.
The research paper’s authors recommend that contact centers seek a solution that offers flexibility in forecasting functionality that will allow call centers to adapt quickly to events occurring outside the call center. Even better, look for one that can draw in data from other departments with related operations so as a way of wholly avoiding unexpected events that require the call center to improvise.
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Edited by Stefania Viscusi