Contact Center Scheduling Has Wide-Ranging Effects

Creating contact center schedules that work for your organization and your customers can make the difference between keeping and losing business. And it doesn’t hurt if your customer service agents like the schedules too.

Many organizations don’t seem particularly interested in catering to the needs of their employees. But they should probably think that through, because unhappy employees tend to be less productive than happy ones. And losing employees is a money-losing venture for businesses.

Studies suggest that it costs employers 33 percent of a worker’s annual salary to hire a replacement when that person leaves. And an estimated one in three hires leaves his or her job within two years.

And that’s just for business in general.

Call centers have one of the highest turnover rates of any industry, Rodney Kuhn of Envision noted in a 2016 blog. He referred to QATC research suggesting call center industry agent churn is between 30 and 45 percent.

“The cost of recruiting, onboarding and training new agents can really put a dent in a company’s wallet,” Kuhn wrote. “What’s more, a high turnover rate can affect morale. It becomes increasingly difficult to create a motivating and positive work environment when agents are constantly leaving.”

Competitive pay and a positive work culture are key sticking points for most employees. But so are schedules that work for them.

That’s why contact centers should be sure to ask agent candidates about their availability and desired workshifts to make sure they map to contact center needs. That way the contact center will know agents will be around when they need them before they go to the time, trouble, and expense of bringing them aboard.

Adopting flexible scheduling strategies and workforce management solutions that allow for shorter and more variable work shifts can also help keep contact centers humming and employees onboard. That way, there will be fewer gaps between shifts, and contact centers have the flexibility to give a certain employee an extra 15 minutes to get to work if that person really needs it.

Employing flexible work models and cloud-based contact center technology can also go a long way toward making things more workable for agent and organization. They can allow agents to work at home, building employee engagement in the process and allowing contact centers to benefit by being able to attract a broader pool of agent candidates and potentially higher agent productivity.

Edited by Maurice Nagle