Make sure to analyze your day-end performance in your center.
September 26 – One of the most important aspects of workforce management analysis is seeing how the business/team has performed on an intraday basis. In the call center environment, we have peak intervals and off-peak intervals. To measure day-end performance on service level, calls offered, and calls answered, we need to check what transpired during […]
Need more flexibility in your call center?
September 19 – 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, but your current staff may very reluctant to modifying their schedules. It is difficult to […]
Try a different approach for determining staff in a revenue-based call center.
September 12 – If you are a contact center that makes money by answering calls, then you may want to think about a different approach for determining staff requirements. If there is revenue associated with a call, then this potential revenue should be a big driver for determining the optimal staffing level. If the revenue […]
Are your line supervisors and managers held responsible for service level?
September 5 – As workforce managers, most (if not all) of you are at least partially held accountable for meeting your service level goals. Even though you are largely responsible for meeting this goal, there are various factors outside of your control that can contribute to not meeting the goal. Agent and supervisor behavior can […]
Accentuate the positive!
August 29 – When explaining Power of One concepts to frontline staff, try to accentuate the positive and not the negative. Staffing and service tradeoffs are often explained in the sense of how much worse service will be and how high occupancy will be when one agent is not in place as planned. Instead of […]
New laws on overtime and contact center management.
August 22 – “Did you really think we want those laws observed? said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against … We’re after power and we mean it … There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only […]
Rebrand your Workforce Management team.
August 15 – When you think about your Workforce Management team and how employees view it, what are the first words that come to mind? If the majority of them are ominous or negative, it may be time to consider your brand. Branding or rebranding your department provides a way to re-invent your group’s image […]
What is the “industry standard” for abandon rate percentages?
August 8 – 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 is […]
Add a checkpoint to models to compare results.
August 1 – Add a checkpoint to your models that compares or evaluates your results to past activity and/or normal ranges for data points and calls attention visually to metrics that may be out of range. For example, when forecasting, use formulas to find normalized peak and valley points for a given day type and […]
Try a “Feature of the Week” plan.
July 25 – Today’s call center systems including ACDs, WFM, QM, and IVRs, have so many capabilities that most of us are only using a very small percentage of the possibilities. We may not even know what is possible and the folks in IT are often so busy it is up to us to figure […]
Make sure to analyze your day-end performance in your center.
July 18 – One of the most important aspects of workforce management analysis is seeing how the business/team has performed on an intraday basis. In the call center environment, we have peak intervals and off-peak intervals. To measure day-end performance on service level, calls offered, and calls answered, we need to check what transpired during […]
Give back through mentorship.
July 11 – I have assumed many roles during my time in workforce management. From scheduling to intraday to forecasting to all functions in-between, I have covered the spectrum of WFM. However, the most rewarding role for me was that of a mentor. The mentor role can only be assumed after time spent as […]