Call Center Scheduling Ensures Optimal Customer Experience

More than once a customer has called into a customer contact center, annoyed that he or she has to answer so many questions in the interactive voice response (IVR) stage of the call. While the consumer may view this as an unnecessary step in the process of reaching a live agent, in reality, this is a critical step for the contact center to ensure the caller is matched with the right agent.

 

There is also another benefit to gathering this information ahead of time – the contact center can capture this valuable data and plug it into its workforce management solution to aid in further forecasting for call volume and subsequent agent scheduling according to projected needs.

Information captured in a customer interaction is essential for that interaction and subsequent performance within the contact center. Proper forecasting cannot be done without looking at past data. Unless that data is gathered in real-time and analyzed throughout the month, contact center agents will not be properly scheduled and the center will fail to deliver the optimal experience for customers.

The challenge for the contact center is that the customer cannot often see or even experience the benefits that can be realized with the use of workforce management and agent scheduling. But, we can easily equate it to going to Wal-Mart on a Saturday afternoon and waiting in a long line just to check out the few things we needed to purchase that day. Visually, it is easy to see that more help is needed in the check-out area of the store.

Just having that visual does not necessarily lessen customers’ frustration, however. The customer will instead be frustrated that the store did not correctly anticipate business for that day and therefore failed to have enough cashiers working. The same is true for the contact center, only the customer does not know how many customers are actually waiting or that agents are actually working as swiftly as possible to get to the next caller.

Instead of evaluating the best way to cater to customers who have been waiting in the queue longer than anticipated is to prevent that from happening in the first place. When proper workforce management solutions are in place, the contact center is equipped to properly schedule its agents for maximum performance, ensuring that customers are not left waiting their turn in line.

Monet Software offers a full line of workforce management options that equip the contact center with the tools necessary to properly schedule contact center agents. With the right scheduling system in place, the contact center delivers a satisfying experience for the customer and the agent.