Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Keeping the Contact Center on Schedule
Sixty-five to 75 percent of the cost of a call center is in people. And when the people are not efficiently scheduled, their time – and the call center’s money – can go to waste. The good news is that call center scheduling software can help with that, generating savings and a variety of other important benefits.
Those benefits include reduced payroll expenses, decreased telecommunications costs, increased revenues, better employee morale, less employee turnover, higher customer satisfaction, and time savings and increased productivity.
The time is right for tools to allow for more accurate scheduling in light of the fact that many simple transactions are now automated and today the humans spend more time on more sophisticated contact centers tasks. And those tasks may require research and followup.
Contact center reps also are now responding to inquiries from multiple channels. And they’re often involved in ongoing training. So there are a lot of demands on these individuals.
Scheduling software for contact centers can monitor agents to ensure they’re adhering to the schedule and record any deviations. It can forecast staff requirements based on historical data, operating parameters, and service-level goals. It can provide agents with the ability to see and modify their schedules via web browsers. It can pull data from different databases as needed. It can record and track vacations, allow for intra-day management, and centralize scheduling for multiple locations. It can allow for scheduling visualization and skills-based routing. And it can bring training into the mix when appropriate.
Additionally, contact center scheduling tools can enable organizations to reward their top performers with preferred shifts. And that may serve to motivate other workers to improve their performance. That said, introducing flexible contact center schedules doesn’t have to happen immediately or for all locations, shifts, or workers. Instead, organizations can start out slow. For example, they can begin with flexible breaks and lunches, or provide flexible start times only to new hires.
Edited by Maurice Nagle