Add flexibility to your call center.
December 26 – The ability to adjust to ever changing call volumes, call arrival patterns, and seasonality is key to meeting service level/ASA objectives. It is difficult to meet targets without some degree of flexibility in your schedule generation process. One way to introduce flexibility to your call center is to recruit new hires […]
Be prepared to answer service level questions!
December 19 – Picture this: it’s a Monday afternoon. You’re currently processing exceptions and scheduling future offline activities. When an operations manager or higher comes by and asks you, “Why aren’t we hitting our service level goals today?” a slight panic sets in. You should be prepared to answer that question, but you aren’t! […]
What is the “industry standard” for abandon rate percentages?
December 12 – I was recently asked what the “industry standard” is for abandon rate percentages. Actually there is no “industry standard” as this can vary a lot by type of call and business. However, most people would say that somewhere between 2-5% is reasonable performance for most call types. Of course, if this […]
Look at schedule adherence from a historical perspective.
December 5 – Schedule adherence has always been a challenge for workforce management teams to calculate, document, and seamlessly disposition time associated with “out of compliance time.” The primary schedule compliance efforts have centered upon real-time adherence: “Where is Bob, and why is he not taking calls?” This is an important function and has a […]
Use a “SWAT” team to improve service delivery results while getting back in touch with your frontline.
November 28 – Ever have those days where you just need a couple more people on the phones to reach your service targets? Or perhaps there is that one day of the month where you know it’s going to be busy and you have already exhausted all your on-phone resources, like the day after a […]
Solicit feedback for the WFM team during Performance Management review time.
November 20 – As we begin to wrap up this year, Performance Management reviews start coming into mind. What have we done well? What could we have improved upon? What do our clients (agents, supervisors, managers) believe can help them? Use this time to solicit feedback for continuous improvement of the WFM team. […]
A sensitivity analysis graph is worth a thousand words.
November 13 – Sensitivity analysis is very powerful, because it makes plain, in a single picture, many of the trade-offs that we must consider when making contact center decisions. A sensitivity analysis graph is one where you plot a performance driver (like volumes, staff levels, AHTs, shrinkage) on your x-axis, and on your y-axis, you […]
Create a Workforce Management Committee.
November 7 – Getting everyone onboard with Workforce Management can be incredibly difficult. Implementing Workforce Management software is the easy part, while getting everyone onboard with using it and using it consistently is much more difficult. One way to increase acceptance and to drive long term continuous improvement is to create a Workforce Management or […]
Keep a master list of skill sets for your WFM team.
October 31 – Within your contact center do you have a master list of which rep can take which type of call? Having a master list on a spread sheet with agents names with the types of calls they can take will make it fast, efficient, and effective for your real time analyst when it comes […]
Some unique WFM challenges from around the world.
October 24 – As we travel around the world talking to contact center managers and workforce management professionals, we run into a wide variety of unique challenges. Sometimes it is interesting to see what other folks are dealing with, if only to make our lives seem not so bad after all. Here are some […]
Improving your long-term plan will improve your short-term operational performance.
October 17 – One of my pet peeves about our contact center industry (and I have a few!) is that too often, center executives make dumb decisions based on a very short-term trend. For example, I’ve seen executives cut their hiring plans based on a short term dip in agent attrition, not understanding the seasonal […]
Set expectations and deadlines for WFM deliverables.
October 3 – Have you ever heard someone in your department say, “I can’t do that task yet – I don’t have the information from (insert other area of the center here).” It is important to set some expectations and deadlines for deliverables that are needed in different areas of workforce management so that each […]