Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
How Can You Prevent Shrinkage in the Contact Center?
Does your contact center suffer from shrinkage? Unless it’s staffed by robots instead of humans, it’s almost certainly a problem. In the call center, shrinkage is defined as any activity preventing agents who are supposed to be taking calls or other contacts from working. It’s one of the most commonly underestimated factors in staffing plans and budgets, according to Monet Software’s (News - Alert) blog.
“It’s impossible to eliminate contact center shrinkage,” according to the blog. “Off-call activity, from training sessions to bathroom breaks, is an inevitable part of the business. Aggressive efforts to eradicate shrinkage in call centers can negatively affect team cohesion, agent training, morale and retention. Excessive shrinkage, however, is a barrier to meeting service levels and achieving profitability.”
So how do you reduce shrinkage without turning into a drill sergeant, a move that could undermine morale and employee engagement, which ALSO leads to poor quality customer experiences?
The good news is that the right call center scheduling and workforce management software can go a long way toward reducing shrinkage. With the right call center scheduling tools, many of the issues that cause shrinkage – non-customer events such as meetings or training -- can be built into the schedule. A high-performance workforce management solution can help identify where shrinkage is getting out of control, so executives and on-the-floor managers can target a response. While there are certain types of shrinkage that a software solution can’t do anything about, such as preventing agents from returning late from lunch breaks or leaving early – it can help reduce shrinkage by pinpointing agent behavior that leads to it.
According to the Monet Blog, shrinkage prevention should happen in multiple steps, which an effective workforce management solution can help with.
- Include all activities, from pre-shift meetings to lunch breaks, on the schedule to facilitate tracking.
- Analyze the sources of shrinkage over which managers have some degree of control, with emphasis on low-hanging fruit and areas driving the greatest negative impacts.
- Evaluate what policies, motivational techniques or other initiatives may help reduce absenteeism, tardiness and general lack of attention by agents on the floor.
- Find the Goldilocks zone for “green area” causes of shrinkage in call centers. For example, is up-training for help desk agents taking too much time, not enough time or about the right amount?
- Implement targeted interventions and monitoring results to determine what’s working and where further effort is required.
- Use real-time shrinkage data to improve schedule adherence throughout each shift.
While it’s never going to be an option to eliminate “unplanned” shrinkage, a good workforce management solution such as Verint (News - Alert) Monet’s cloud workforce management for contact centers can ensure that it’s reduced to an acceptable level.
Edited by Maurice Nagle