Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
How to Optimize Call Center Scheduling
Call center scheduling is no easy task.
It requires bringing together lots of moving pieces. You need to consider call center traffic trends, agent availability, agent skillsets, and even factors like sick days and weather that can impact the availability of workers.
Getting it right might seem like more art than science. But organizations that have the right processes and systems in place can make call center scheduling a far less painful and more predictable endeavor.
A recent Talkdesk blog offers tips on how your organization can optimize its call center scheduling effort. Following this advice could help you ensure you always have the human resources you need, that you are not paying for idle time, and that your agents are happy and productive.
It all starts with the hiring process, of course. The piece notes that it’s important to hire new agents based on their availability.
Having a core group of top agents answering calls from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the timezone of your largest customer base is paramount, it says. And those who create schedules should do so with agent skills and specializations in mind.
To ensure you have adequate and appropriate human resources in place during peak periods, the blog suggests, offer agents incentives to work at those times.
Managers should also monitor important call center metrics in real time and adjust schedules accordingly. That way they can, for example, tweak the schedule to keep agents on the floor when needed and move after-call work, breaks, lunch, meetings, and training to other times.
While agents need to remain flexible to such changes as new conditions arise, it’s helpful to remember that providing agents themselves with a bit of flexibility can go a long way in building morale, which tends to translate into better customer service and lower agent churn.
For example, the blog suggests that organizations can give agents options in scheduling, in terms of dates, and start and stop times. A call scheduling platform can support that more easily than a manual scheduling system could. Online platforms can also provide agents with the ability to change and swap schedules themselves, without taking up their managers’ time. And it can schedule them for training or other activities when they’re not on the phone.
Forecasting is, of course, important to make sure the correct number of agents is always available. Organizations should also always have some agents on call to fill any gaps that pop up. To make that more efficient and agent-friendly, the blog suggests, organizations should consider allowing those on-call agents to work from home if they’re called on to help out.
Planning ahead, explaining expectations and scheduling policy, being flexible, and continually monitoring current situations all go a long way toward call center scheduling optimization.
Edited by Maurice Nagle