Workforce Management Featured Article
Intraday Management Helps Call Center Managers Make Proactive Schedule Changes in Real Time
In the contact center, even the very best schedule can go awry. Employees could show up late or leave early (or simply not show up at all). Power or Internet interruptions can put everyone behind, and even innocuous things like fire drills can render the schedule obsolete. A good schedule, however, can withstand unexpected occurrences. For companies using workforce management and scheduling solutions, this flexibility comes from the ability to engage in intraday management.
Put simply, intraday management is a set of activities performed within the course of a day or a contact center shift to manage unplanned events that require immediate action to maintain consistent performance. It’s difficult, if not downright impossible, to engage in intraday planning when you’re still manually building schedules with spreadsheets (since chances are good managers will need to be people-managing during events that throw off the schedule rather than sitting with a spreadsheet), but actually quite easy with modern workforce management software, according to a recent white paper written by workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert).
“Dashboards provide visual displays of call center data, providing an instant snapshot of what is happening at every moment throughout the day,” wrote the white paper’s authors. “With this data managers can make changes before the customer experience can be affected.”
Contact center managers build schedules based on historical information. They may use annual stats, monthly stats, weekly stats and/or daily stats to do so. But while all of this information is important for tracking progress on quality assurance and customer satisfaction goals, it can’t predict precisely what’s going to happen today, or in the next 10 minutes. This is why contact center managers require a solution that will them to be proactive using real-time information.
“You may find situations where a real-time response could have improved customer service, rather than finishing a shift with a staffing issue,” wrote the white paper’s authors. “All it takes is a few hours to lose customers. That’s why it is critical for contact center management to also keep track of key metrics throughout the course of a day.”
Thanks to solutions such as those offered by Monet, using a graphical display of agent schedules, a manager can drag and drop breaks, lunches and other exceptions to adjust the contact center schedule as needed. Real-time updates are instantly recorded, and any surpluses or shortages are displayed for any part of the day. When the unexpected occurs, managers will instantly know the best way to react without sacrificing customer service.
Other benefits include the ability to automatically let agents know the schedule has changed – word of mouth or e-mail is time-consuming and ineffective – and these software solutions can even provide agents, agent groups, supervisors and managers with warning alerts that actions need to be taken to get back on schedule.
“It is an empowering solution that helps contact centers better meet their service targets. Contact centers that are not managing intra-day run a much higher risk of not achieving service goals,” according to Monet.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi