Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Smart Forecasting Looks at Historical, Current Conditions
People are contact center’s No. 1 expenditure. That makes sense because humans remain a primary means through which businesses reach out to prospects through outbound campaigns and try to assist customers with incoming inquiries.
The good news is that these people can also be one of businesses’ leading assets. When someone who understands a customer’s needs reaches out to that person at the right time with the right solution, that demonstrates the business understands and cares about them. And when agents can help customers who reach out to them with answers to their questions and solutions to their problems – and do it in a friendly and efficient way – those contact center employees can build customer loyalty and even drive cross-sell and up-sell business.
But for that kind of thing to happen, contact center operations need to make sure an adequate number of the right kind of people are available to reach out and respond to their customers and prospects. That’s no easy task, particularly for contact centers that still rely on manual processes and spreadsheets to do forecasting and scheduling.
Workforce management solutions help contact centers do more accurate forecasting and create more effective and flexible agent and manager schedules. Of course, WFM functionality varies. So here are a few tips on what to look for in a WFM solution.
Look for a WFM with a forecasting engine that is agile. That will allow your contact center to adjust to changing conditions.
Considering what happened yesterday or a year ago today is a smart thing to do when forecasting and scheduling. But just because something happened yesterday or a year ago today doesn’t necessarily mean lightening will strike twice. So look beyond linear forecasts.
Smart forecasting and scheduling also considers the day of the week, the time of month, and factors related to seasonality as well as non-recurring events that can impact contact center traffic and talent demands. A good forecasting solution populated with the appropriate data will know when a new campaign launches or tickets to a popular performance go on sale, for example. And it can adjust the schedule to contend with the expected higher volume of calls in the day or days that followed that launch or availability date.
Forecasting data also can be used to inform other aspect of contact center operations. For example, it is sees that volume for a specific kind of traffic is expected to increase significantly during a specific week, a contact manager could use that data to adjust the IVR message so callers are routed more quickly to the agents who can trained to help them.
Edited by Maurice Nagle