2019 Tip of the Week Archive2019-01-14T12:50:07-05:00

Tips for adding flexibility to your call center.

October 14 – 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 that […]

Be sure a call type has enough volume to be forecast accurately.

October 7 – In many centers, skill-based routing is implemented and  It is all too common to see nearly as many call types as there are agents.  Calls are being sorted down into unique types that match specific customer needs, language, product, customer demographics, or even agent training. It is fine to identify different customers […]

Keep your historical patterns in shape.

September 30 – Historical data is statistical representation of past contact arrival and average handle time stored by workforce planning applications for use in future forecasting and scheduling.   Forecasts are based (either partially or wholly) on the assumption that the past is a reliable predictor of the future. From time to time, an unusual event […]

Exceeding your service goals: was it worth it? 

September 16 – We met our service goals this week! We crushed it on Saturday! We made more sales this month than any month before! We hit our collections target! These are all things we want to be exclaiming, right? It is a good thing when we meet or exceed our goals or expectations. It […]

Set a theme for each year to energize your team. 

September 9 –  Want to energize and motivate your team?  Set a ‘theme’ for the year and use it all year.   We used the theme Rise and Shine last year.  To roll it out, we tied key words to “R I S E” – Renovate, Innovate, Synergize and Educate. We rolled out our theme in […]

Are you using surveys to improve the service you provide?

August 26 – Surveys can be great tools toward improving the service you offer your internal customers and/or identifying areas of opportunity within your organization.  They can be easily created on one of the many websites out there (such as surverymonkey.com) many of which are free for basic use.  The results can be anonymous, making […]

Planning will begin soon…. 

August 19 –  As this is the Summer of 2019, you are rapidly approaching “The Planning Season” for the year 2020.   Financially, organizations plan for growth, new software, new innovations, and a variety of new initiatives. What many organizations miss in the planning process is considering the training and “health checks” of current software, processes, […]

Getting back to basics. 

August 12 – All too often, we fall back on technology to give us the information and results that we want and need.  Think about it — when was the last time you did something the hard way with a good old-fashioned pen and paper to find the answer to a problem?  While it may […]

Are you using surveys to improve the service you provide?

August 5 – Surveys can be great tools toward improving the service you offer your internal customers and/or identifying areas of opportunity within your organization.  They can be easily created on one of the many websites out there (such as surverymonkey.com) many of which are free for basic use.  The results can be anonymous, making […]

Managing time-off requests for weather-driven work areas.

July 29 – Do you have a work area that is impacted substantially when adverse weather occurs?  If so, you might consider limiting the approval of time-off in advance and then allow more people off closer to the actual date after checking the weather forecast. Instead of granting everyone time off ahead of the date, […]

Managing time off requests for weather-driven work areas.

July 22 – Do you have a work area that is impacted substantially when adverse weather occurs?  If so, you might consider limiting the approval of time-off in advance and then allow more people off closer to the actual date after checking the weather forecast. Instead of granting everyone time off ahead of the date, […]

What is the “industry standard” for abandon rate percentages?

July 15 – 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.  More… However, most people would say that somewhere between 2-5% is reasonable performance for most call types.  Of course, if this […]

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