Workforce Management Featured Article
Monet Offers Help for Call Center Staffing Expenses
See if you agree with this statement: “The overwhelming majority of ongoing call center expense is related to staffing.”
Of course you do. As officials of Monet Software notedrecently, “optimizing the personnel resource is critical. Overstaffing results in needless spending for unnecessary staff, while understaffing will lower service levels, increase staff turnover and impact your revenues.”
Monet WFM Live is desgined to help users automate tasks that have an immediate impact on the bottom line through what company officials describe as “more accurate call volume forecasting, staffing calculations and scheduling and daily performance tracking.”
Breaking down the ROI to their Monet Workforce Management offering, company officials say it can result in measurable improvements in the following areas:
More efficient scheduling and agent usage. The savings associated with more efficient scheduling includes reducing overall staff hours and need for overtime and identification of overstaffing. Call centers using WFM systems generally experience a minimum reduction of two percent for staff hours with an average potential savings in the 5 – 10 percent range.
Automation of scheduling tasks. Manual or Excel-based spreadsheet forecasting and scheduling consumes much of a supervisor’s time in many call centers. With WFM it is generally expected that at least 25 percent of the time currently devoted to manual input can be saved.
Reduction in workforce shrinkage. Many hours of work time are wasted due to excessive non-productive interruptions. A WFM system can provide historical and real-time information on agent schedule adherence and exceptions, for better management and control of staff, reducing workforce shrinkage by 10 to 20 minutes per agent per day.
In addition to these measurable cost savings, “there are many more intangible benefits,” company officials say, adding that perhaps the most important of these is “the addition of a sophisticated ‘what-if’ planning tool. This will allow management to forecast and plan staffing needs for the short-term, to respond to unexpected changes, as well as long-term budgeting and planning.”
In September TMC (News - Alert) reportedthat Monet AnyWhere was touted by company officials as a tool for “efficient agent and supervisor communication.” Because who doesn’t want that?
Fast, real-time and effective communication between agents and supervisors, as anybody who’s in the business knows, is “important for managing schedule adherence and exception planning.” Monet AnyWhere provides an avenue for this communication through Web-enabled self-service applications.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Chris DiMarco