Access this collection of tips and resources to help you effectively manage your contact center operation.
- With all the opportunities available to the contact center business, don't miss out on opportunities to network and learn by attending vendor user conferences, trade shows and industry networking meetings. You will be amazed at the number of companies interested in sharing helpful ideas. You may even find companies that have solutions for the challenges you are currently experiencing. Check out swpp.org, ccng.com or iex.com for coming events.
- Are you ready for the annual vacation planning challenge? This endeavor often involves a great deal of administration and an extended time frame, and can be a very manual, time consuming ordeal. Explore using an automated tool to calculate agent earned time, create allowed time for each day of the vacation year and track remaining time throughout the year. Talk to your friends at IEX for solutions.
- Performance management solutions provide employee scorecards with individual stats such as quality scores, average handle time and schedule adherence to help employees better self-manage their performance. Executives also have visibility into the operation to help drive the performance of managers and supervisors. Download a white paper on performance management at www.iex.com/performance.
- Customer quality ratings can greatly impact a business. How does your center measure up? Do your customers feel they were taken care of appropriately? Were they transferred too often? How long was their wait time? Delivering a positive customer experience reduces churn and agent attrition. Ensure you have tools in place to track and deliver an optimal customer experience.
- Ensure you are on the most up-to-date software upgrades for your IVR, quality monitoring, workforce management and reporting packages. Are there any features that you are missing out on that could benefit your business?
- The words ‘dynamic’ and ‘virtual’ are often used to describe call center environments. Are your technologies able to allow for work from home agents? Would this be a benefit for your business? Maybe you aren’t there yet, but consider tapping into a local college or senior center and providing part time schedules for those who have a need only for a supplemental income.
- Sometimes the change in seasons calls for a change in agents’ schedules. Review your current trends in handle times, occupancy and call volumes. Are your agents’ schedules falling in line with those trends? Do new schedules need to be created? Is there a need to consult the training team to help reduce handle times? Are marketing campaigns impacting your call rates more or less than anticipated? Often times, simple changes can be made to deliver significant results.
- Have you developed a process deserving of best-in-class recognition? Many companies recognize outstanding achievements for how their customers use technology in an insightful way. These types of awards offer a great way to showcase yourself, your team and your business. For more information on the IEX recognition program, visit www.iex.com/iexcellence.
- October is a perfect time to reach out to product marketing and other strategic partners for a heads up on the upcoming year's initiatives. Advance knowledge of product upgrades or releases can be extremely beneficial in keeping the forecast and staffing requirements tightly tuned. Also be aware of changes in corporate policy or the regulatory environment that may influence average handling time. A change of a few seconds can have tremendous impact to staffing levels.
- Build enthusiasm and create fun for those working the holidays by organizing games, competitions or drawings on special days. Divide the workday into quarters and have agents submit their guesses for number of calls received. Or award a prize to the agent answering the customer with the most vowels in their last name or the customer calling from the furthest distance. It doesn't have to be complicated to lighten the day.
- A great way to develop a partnership with agents is by sending regular print or email newsletters to develop a team environment. Include business and personal updates, such as potlucks, award recognition, and new marketing strategies being used by the business. It’s also a great way to inform agents of upcoming holidays, changes to schedules and the ‘whys’ of business changes, helping agents feel more valued by the company.
- Make certain to review your arrival patterns in April and October and adjust accordingly for Daylight Savings Time changes. As more daylight is available, calls tend to come in later in the day, so be sure your staffing adjustments move with the flow of the calls.
- Consider variable scheduling options to better cover your staffing needs. Utilize different start times for your schedule generations. Instead of starting all shifts on the top and bottom of the hour, allow schedules to vary to the quarter hour as well. Allowing shifts to start on the quarter hours will help efficiencies.
- Be creative in scheduling for the needs of the business as well as the needs of the agent population. Some examples may be split shifts (great for working moms), 10 & 12 hour shifts (good for weekend coverage), and variable length shifts to meet your ever dynamic business needs (i.e. 12 hours on Monday, 10 hours on Tuesday, 6 hours on Thursday and 12 hours on Friday based on your staffing requirements).
- Explore automation of mundane tasks and empowerment of your agent staff by using available tools. Automating tasks such as vacation processing and approval, shift trades and schedule changes frees up time for other functions. Delivery of reports to a web browser can be automated and dispatched to all levels of the organization in lieu of compiling reports manually or printing and distributing paper copies of statistics.
- What role does schedule adherence play in your center? Contact centers that introduce the concept of adherence to agents while they are in training create a culture of understanding and accountability. If you currently measure weekly or monthly adherence averages, consider distributing daily historical reports to agents. Doing so provides agents with greater visibility into their performance and helps them be more mindful when following their schedules throughout the day.
- How often are agent skills changed throughout the day? If this is more than a rare occasion in your center, it is possible changes need to be made to your contact routing scripts. Many of today’s more sophisticated ACDs provide conditional routing that automatically redirects calls when certain conditions are in place. If you want to maximize efficiency in your center, minimize reactive skill changes by partnering with the IT organization to ensure effective routing scripts are in place.
- The size of workforce management teams can vary significantly. One would expect the number of agents is the key factor, when, in fact, it is the way workforce related tasks are organized and assigned that makes the greatest impact to team size. The key is in knowing what to centralize and what to decentralize. Number-related tasks such as forecasting and intraday monitoring are easy to centralize, especially in large organizations. On the flip side, advances in agent self-service tools now make it possible to decentralize agent-related tasks such as schedule trades and vacation requests. Say “good-bye” to redundant data entry and “hello” to agent empowerment!
- When it comes to agent incentives, one size does not fit all. For example, some agents are motivated by money while others are motivated by stability. Keep this in mind when hiring new agents and work with your Human Resources department to think of creative incentive and differential options. Some agents may be fine accepting a lower wage rate in exchange for a stable, Monday-through-Friday schedule, while other agents may be willing to work a more flexible schedule when offered a higher pay rate.
- Networking – both in person and online – is a great way to stay on top of industry trends. Connect with these groups for meet-and-greet opportunities: Call Center Networking Group (www.ccng.com); The Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (www.swpp.org); Contact Center World (www.contact centerworld.com); Incoming Calls Management Institute (www.incoming.com); CRMx change (www.crmxchange.com); American Teleservices Association (www.ataconnect.org); Customer Care & Services Forum (www.sharedinsights. com); and The Call Center School (www.thecallcenter school.com.)
- How do you explain why you need 84 staff on the payroll when you only require 56 people on the phones? While the increase in staff may seem unnecessary, 34% shrinkage is typical of many centers. Explain the difference by breaking this “lost time” into categories such as breaks, vacation, meetings, training, back-office work and others. Then work to get agreement that each category is relevant and reasonable. Finally, start tracking each category separately to find ways of recapturing lost time and document improvements.
- Want to “grow” your own workforce management staff? An intern program might be just what you need. This program allows agents to get off the phones for 30, 60 or 90 days to work with the workforce team and gain on-the-job training. When a position becomes available for a permanent team member, you will have a field of ready-trained personnel to choose from rather than looking outside the company. As a side benefit, when the agents return to the floor they take with them a better understanding of the issues faced by the workforce management team.
- If your contact center staff numbers 50 or more, it is time to consider investing in workforce management software. As your operation grows you are likely spending significant amounts of time retrieving information, creating forecasts, trying to fit schedules—and still not getting the results you need. TotalView SC is a full-feature workforce management system tailored to meet the needs of smaller centers, single or multisite, with 100 or fewer agents. You will get more accurate forecasts, better schedules and detailed reports in far less time than you are spending today, leaving you with more time to look for ways to improve.
- In the contact center world, flexibility leads to efficiency and efficiency leads to cost savings. Incorporate as much flexibility into your agent schedules as your environment will allow. At a minimum, use flexible breaks and lunches if you can. Though not all agents may be able to work flexible start times, partner with your HR department to offer an incentive for agents who can.
- Real-time adherence can be an effective tool, but only when coupled with a process for ensuring agent schedules are updated throughout the day. Doing so provides the additional benefit of always having an accurate view of agent resources needed to facilitate proactive decision making.
- If you currently measure service level attainment only at the daily level, consider measuring at the interval level, too. Measuring the percentage of service level intervals met each day ensures efficient handling of customer contacts no matter when they call.
- As you near the planning and budget time, be sure to utilize your workforce management software to its full potential. Use “what-if” analysis to determine the impacts of various scenarios on next year’s staffing requirements. Many factors affect your call volumes or handle times. Volume may change due to self-service technology implementations, increased business, or adding more call types. Call handle times may also be higher or lower next year due to changes in your business. Once the impact is understood, use the software to evaluate different strategies for managing it.
- Are you ready for your customers to “fall back”? Many centers experience volume peaks before the work day begins, at lunch time, and after work when the sun goes down. When Daylight Saving Time ends, that late peak may appear sooner as darkness arrives earlier. Similarly, for the spring switch, the peak may occur later. Review your historical patterns to see if your center experiences this shift. If so, make sure your plans account for it.
- When implementing a schedule adherence policy, communication with agents and supervisors is key. Consider providing daily reports to agents and supervisors for two to three weeks prior so they have vision into their current scores. Doing so may actually lead to improved results before any real measurements come into effect.
- Looking for ways to motivate your agents? As a first step, spend a little time listing ways you could de-motivate them such as changing their schedules without discussing the reasons, not listening or providing feedback to suggestions, or criticizing them in public. Make sure you are not doing anything on the list before coming up with any new ideas.
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