Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Improving Your Forecasting in the Contact Center
Of all the managerial tasks in the contact center, building accurate schedules is possibly the most daunting. It’s both an art and a science, and it requires a great deal of experience supported by effective tools. After all, it’s a bit like weather forecasting: you examine the data and make educated guesses based both on history and current events.
Service Levels Versus Staffing Costs
One of the more difficult aspects of managing a contact center is continually hearing that you need to do a better job meeting service levels and fostering customer experience excellence. At the same time, sometimes the very same people are telling you to keep staffing costs down. It starts to feel like being expected to drive the car twice as far while somebody siphons half the gas out of the tank.
Forecast Accuracy Can Help
Forecast accuracy can be defined as the difference between the amount of work projected to be needed and the amount of work that is actually required. By improving the forecast, you can trim the fat out of the contact center labor costs while simultaneously keeping customer satisfaction levels high. More precise forecasting allows managers to get closer to that seemingly unobtainable goal of aligning supply and demand to bring about optimal performance for the lowest possible cost.
Where Many Contact Centers Go Wrong
Non-call work. It’s easy to underestimate the amount of time that special events like training and breaks can take out of a schedule. Forecasting solutions such as Monet Software’s call center scheduling module automatically factors in breaks and lunches while observing service level goals in order to generate an optimized schedule. It does this by allowing users to create “shift profiles” that contain various shift lunches and breaks. Managers can set various shift profiles for holidays, normal, optimized and weekend shift patterns.
Predicting special events. Many call center managers rely too heavily on historical call volume and fail to take into consideration special events (a new web site, a promotion or even bad weather) that might affect call volume. It’s therefore important to do a little “campaign forecasting” to ensure that the effects of non-recurring or irregular events are included in the forecast.
Practice “What If” Exercises
Do you know what would happen in your contact center if 40 percent of the staff were brought low by the flu, for example, or a storm that interrupted parts of your network? It’s useful to regularly run hypothetical “what-if” scenarios that show what would happen in case of extreme events. This way, you can plan for them to lessen their effects on service levels if they come to pass. (Even if they don’t, these exercises could give you valuable insight into your operations.)
A good call center scheduling solution can help you do all these things to improve your forecasts and ensure you’re staffing at optimal levels to keep customer expectations met and costs under control.
Edited by Maurice Nagle