20 Apr 2018 | Blog
Forecasting and scheduling are crucial within the call center operation, but what actually happens in your day-to-day performance can create chaos with even perfect planning. Thankfully, a solution is at hand: Intraday Management.
Even the best forecasts can’t be right all the time In most cases, staffing forecasts are completed months in advance. The agent’s schedules are created based on those forecasts and distributed to the agents and managers weeks before. Staffing requirements, training activities, and break times are all based on forecasts, often down to the 15-minute interval, made weeks before what is actually happening in the call center.
Forecasts are exactly that, forecasts. They are only a best guess of what may happen during a day of a contact center operation. In reality, what actually happens in much different from the forecast. This can be because the contact center is hit by higher than average absenteeism, fluctuations in call volumes, and other challenges.
The solution: Komyunity Intraday Management with the help of Komyunity reduces the impact of surprises, by enabling your agents to tell you changes in their schedule at the time that it is happening. For example, letting you know they will be 15 minutes late to start their shift, or that they can work extra time to cover a staffing shortage.
Komyunity allows you to notify agents not only of changes in their schedule but ask them to change their current activity. If you are understaffed on the phones, you can inform agents working on back-end tasks to get on the phones. The schedule will immediately be changed, and the agent will be working on the tasks that will make sure you deliver a good service level to customers efficiently. This will make the intraday planners’ job much simpler because you are taking away so much of the time-consuming manual changes that need to be made to daily schedules.
By monitoring calls, keeping an eye on over the day’s operation, and moving agents to where you need them, intraday management can smooth out the peaks and troughs in the day’s performance.
Contact us to find out how Komyunity can help with your intra-day planning.