Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Teaching Time Management Skills to Contact Center Employees
While the focus on quality in recent years has meant that contact centers are urged to pay a little less attention to time and more attention to the customer experience – by, for example, emphasizing first-call resolution rather than average handle time – it’s impossible to ignore time. An expertly trained and congenial contact center agent isn’t going to please too many customers if he or she leaves them waiting too long, or handles only a few customers a day with the white-glove treatment.
Balancing time and quality is, of course, a major concern for contact center managers. You want to give agents enough time to wrap up calls satisfactorily, but not so much time that they’re causing long call queues. You want to be sure that you have enough agents on staff for predictive call and contact volumes during the day. In a recent blog post, Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo wrote that workforce management software can help with all of this, but there are some limits: employee time management skills.
“[Workforce management software] won’t help agents who either don’t own a watch or don’t pay attention to it,” wrote Ciarlo. “The efficiency of your call center demands team members that are organized, and possess reliable time management skills.”
Hiring only organized agents who are great at time management sounds like a good idea, but in the absence of this fantasy workforce, contact center managers need to team time management, and put some steps in place that increase accountability and reduce wasted time. Some employees starting out in their careers may have never been taught time management skills.
“Coaches can help where needed,” wrote Ciarlo. “They can encourage agents to set goals for how many calls they should complete in on day, and reinforce the importance of start times, end times and break times. Monitor progress and reward those that are able to change their habits.”
While agents may need a lot of help at first, it’s counterintuitive to have managers and supervisors hover too closely. Put the framework in place, communicate to agents what you expect of them, coach a bit, and then step back.
“At first the coach or trainer may have to set up a goal schedule for these agents,” wrote Ciarlo. “But ideally this is a habit they should begin to pick up themselves. Suggest that it become customary to take 10 or 15 minutes at the end of a shift to review performance for that day, and to plan a schedule for tomorrow (or the next active day). The more they can plan ahead, the easier it will be to adhere to the schedule.”
A good workforce management solution can help at all steps of this process to increase accountability, ensure there are enough agents in the right place at the right time through forecasting, and help keep track of agent performance with alerts and reporting. Ideally, agents will learn to pay attention to their own performance alerts and reports to see how they’ve improved. Time management skills, once learned, are never “unlearned,” and every function in the contact center can benefit from them.
Edited by Alicia Young