Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Face Growing Business in the Call Center and the Back Office with Workforce Management
Now that the dust has settled for 2014, analysts have had a chance to evaluate the year and its business climate. Critical because 2014’s performance offers clues to an economy still in flux, it’s worth noting that some industries are still struggling, while others are seeming definite signs of recovery. Others are even booming.
Using research from Dallas-based Site Selection Group (News - Alert), a location advisory and economic incentives firm specializing in call center site selection services, the call center advocacy group jobs4america found that 14,544 new U.S. contact center jobs were created in the fourth quarter of 2014 alone. This resulted in a total call center jobs creation figure of 49,569 in 2014. In addition, in the second half of 2014, the U.S. contact center industry created 3,839 more jobs than the total of new contact center jobs created anywhere else in the world, according to Matt Zemon, chairman of jobs4america and CEO of Florida-based contact center outsourcing services provider American Support.
"For three quarters in a row, the American contact center industry continues to grow," said Zemon.
Experts attribute this growth to a number of factors. For starters, many companies are “reshoring” jobs, or bringing them back from overseas location because of problems with quality, management or customers’ negative perceptions of shipping jobs offshore at a time when U.S. unemployment is still elevated. In other cases, it’s because the savings are no longer perceived to be there.
"We're seeing a lot of inquiries to reshore jobs, simply because the cost benefit of doing things overseas is diminishing," Jeff Sheehan, senior vice president at Site Selection Group, told Destination CRM. "The gap with regard to labor costs [between U.S. and foreign markets, particularly in Asia] is getting a lot smaller."
For other companies, there is impetus to create U.S.-based call center jobs based on other cost saving factors, such as distributed workforces that take advantage of cloud-based solutions, or agents who work from their homes, saving on overhead. Whatever the case for the rising number of U.S. call center jobs, Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo says American companies need to be ready to manage their growing workforces and excel in call center scheduling using reliable workforce management solutions.
“Workforce management software (WFM) is the key to delivering that service, and not just in the customer-facing operations of the front office,” he noted in a recent blog post. “In the back office, WFM can streamline a variety of tasks, including simulations to improve forecasts for staffing and call volume, and scheduling improvements created by optimization of agent availability and service levels.”
Many companies today are still employing workforce management solutions that cannot handle multichannel customer interactions, and cannot integrate back-office functions into the workforce as a whole. In these cases, says Ciarlo, growing companies looking for improved efficiency would be well served to investigate a system that will allow them to take a more proactive approach in managing back office activities and call center growth – no matter how busy you get in 2015 and beyond.