Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Better Call Center Scheduling Starts with Better Forecasting
It’s a familiar refrain to any call center manager: Improve the quality of the customer experience, while simultaneously reducing labor costs. The executive layer always seems capable of requesting these two things without a trace of irony, as if they’re not self-canceling. It’s left to call center management to figure out how.
It’s not a great secret that adherence to the call center schedule is one way to keep quality high while avoiding having to add to the headcount. That’s a given. The question is, how do you maintain high adherence? Human nature, chaos and life always seem to get in the way. In a recent article, Call Centre Helper noted that at the heart of adherence is good forecasting. Not “forecasting the way we’d like it to be,” but “forecasting the way it’s probably going to be.”
“Forecast accuracy can be defined as the difference between the amount of work per time period projected to be presented and the amount of work that is actually presented,” according to the author.
How Do You Make More Accurate Forecasts?
There are a number of things call center management can do to create more accurate forecasts for the purpose of workforce management.
Ensure you have the ability to forecast special events – It’s not difficult to build an ‘okay’ forecast for a business that’s going to be the same day in and day out, but how many businesses are like that? You need a solution that will allow you to include call volume predictions for special events: A catalog drop, a new marketing campaign, a sale, a national event relevant to your business, or even the weather.
“Campaign forecasting provides the ability to include those non-recurring or irregular events in the creation of a forecast,” the article notes. “When coupled with the ability to account for the effects of regular events, the contact center now has a very powerful, flexible tool to create very precise forecasts.”
Include all media – Some contact centers forecast for the phone calls, but they forget (or don’t want to remember) that agents today are expected to take a lot of time handling queries in other media, such as email or web chat. Ensure your forecasting solution can handle all these other channels in a centralized way.
Run simulations – Successful contact centers occasional run hypothetical “what if” scenarios to essentially practice for unforeseen events. What would happen if half the call center went down with the flu? What would happen if the call center lost power due to a storm? A good contact center scheduling solution can help you do this quite easily.
Use modern scheduling solutions – If you’re still using manual methods to create forecasts, you’re likely falling behind. Modern workforce management and call center scheduling solutions can help you build better forecasts by using both current and historical information and allowing you to factor in training, vacations, sick time and other elements of scheduling, even down to the quarter-hour interval. Simply put, to build a better forecast, you need better forecasting tools.
Edited by Erik Linask