Holidays Wreak Havoc with Call Center Schedules

While most contact centers don’t deal with life-and-death situations, there are exceptions in healthcare and emergency services. For these call centers, getting scheduling right – particularly on holidays – is critical for public safety. For holidays such as the Fourth of July, calls to emergency services actually escalate, so summer holidays are particularly important to ensure proper staffing. Alcohol plus fireworks can often be a toxic mix, and each Fourth of July, thousands of people are injured by fireworks.

"It can get busy so, we can see about an average of about 1,000 calls by midnight," Brynn Sides, Dispatch Supervisor, SunComm (News - Alert) 911 Communications, told NBC affiliate KNDO 23.

Sides said that's about 300 more calls than the average day, but working in a 911 call center, call taker Jenyne Wells says there's never an average day or call. Especially on fourth of July.

"It's super busy, it's fun. You get extra fire departments down in the Lower Valley, you always get the extra fun calls of you know lots of fires, usually a finger is lost somewhere along the way." Wells told KNDO.

Even if you’re not taking emergency calls, holidays can make for very irregular work schedules. Agents themselves may be taking time off, and calls and contacts won’t follow normal patterns of behavior. For these times, you may wish to consider engaging temporary staff, directing overflow to an outsourced partner, putting agents “on call” at home, or using a “slant schedule.” (The latter is an irregular schedule that gives workers more hours on certain days of the week, and fewer on others.)

Another option is to ensure that the contact center is using a scheduling solution with intraday management capabilities that can cope with unexpected events during the workday. Platforms with intraday schedule management such as Monet Software allow supervisors to see anomalies within the call volume – calls high above average, for example – and take action to modify the forecast and create new agent requirements. Once completed, new agent requirements would be displayed allowing for proactive changes to the current days schedule to accommodate sudden changes in call volume and call handle times.

Edited by Maurice Nagle