Staffing – Management’s Greatest Headache

Staffing is typically the greatest headache in contact center management – too many staff and costs rise; too few and customer service suffers badly. Striking some soft of a balance, therefore, is the key to productivity and efficiency.

Unfortunately, many organizations still employ a manual approach to forecasting and scheduling. By relying on paper- or spreadsheet-generated estimates, they lack any real way to accurately measure the degree of adherence to the schedule.

Reporting, if done at all, is a nightmare. The end product is too much time and effort spent managing staff for little return. The organization continues in a state of flux between too many and too few agents. As they cannot adapt fluidly to changes in contact center volumes, profitability remains low.

To compound the problem even further, we’re heard from many contact center managers that a large number of available workforce management (WFM) products are not intended for small and medium-sized contact centers. Originally built for large-scale environments, they do not scale down adequately, are expensive to implement and take up too many resources to run. One size fits all doesn’t work well for companies without large IT departments for support.

The proper WFM tool can fill this void by delivering a powerful and affordable workforce management solution for contact centers from 25 to over 1,000 agents. Designed to offer a flexible solution with enterprise-grade features and performance, there are  WFM tools that have been formulated for the specific requirements of the small to medium-sized contact center.

Many WFM’s have robust tool sets that integrate with virtually any ACD or PBX, quickly

If you’ve done your homework and chosen the best WFM solution for your center, installation should be simple, taking one to two days for most users, and pain free.

Once your WFM solution is running, your contact center managers should be able to  accurately forecast call volume and timing, schedule by agent skills and experience and try ‘what-if’ scenarios. They can manage seasonal volumes and create schedules for special days or day parts, as well as develop customized shifts and schedules. Best of all, many of these WFM solutions allow management in real time.

Be sure to opt for an enterprise-grade WFM tool that can help you unlock the efficiency of your contact center and one that scales up easily as the operation grows.

Further, many of these WFM tools are also available on a hosted basis.  Many solutions can, if desired, host the application on its servers, relieving you, the customer, of the burden of an initial upfront investment. Instead, the customer has manageable monthly payments based on service consumption.

Workforce Management relieves the headache – it’s like an aspirin for your center!

Take two aspirin and contact us in the morning...