Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Mining Data to Improve Call Center Scheduling
Data is one of the greatest assets to any vertical market in the age of AI, automation and machine learning. Today’s software and systems collect massive amounts of data and are increasingly able to parse and analyze that data for actionable intelligence. One of the greatest mines for valuable data is the call center, where potentially hundreds of interactions per minute are being logged and stored.
In addition to feedback from customers in the form of surveys and sales data, call center technology logs call volume and routing, and can provide important information about the performance of agents. The data from these transactions is perhaps one of the most valuable tools a call center manager can utilize, and offers important metrics that are key to successful call center scheduling.
One of the biggest complaints from agents in the call center industry is erratic scheduling, which almost always negatively impacts personal time and overall quality of life. Scheduling, along with repetitive work that doesn’t offer much of a challenge, are the main reasons call centers have one of the highest turnover rates of any industry.
By making use of the large amounts of data being collected from a variety of technologies, call center managers can address these problems directly in the form of better and more efficient scheduling. Having the proper amount of staff with the right blend of skills on the schedule is the key to serving customers as well as ensuring agents are working regular and predictable hours. This data can also go a long way toward keeping those agents engaged and challenged and making the most of their skills.
Workforce management solutions can be valuable tool when it comes to mining this data to create a better and more efficient call center schedules. Coaching and training can also be factored into the schedule, to make the best use of agents’ downtime, ensuring they’re not bored or doing non-work related tasks and also providing them with new and improved skillsets to keep workers engaged and satisfied.
Understanding how all the applications and technologies being used in a call center can work together to improve scheduling and maximize productivity is absolutely key to efficient management. The data is already there – in various forms and from numerous sources, just waiting to be mined for insights and intelligence. By streamlining that data to identify important trends and traffic, call center managers can improve scheduling practices while also improving the overall performance of their call centers.
Edited by Erik Linask