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The overwhelming long-term benefits of choosing the right call center workforce management software cannot be overstated: You’ll help improve the call center’s customer service, boost employee morale, reduce costs, and stand out by helping employees on their automation journey.
Today’s workforce management solutions technology can support call center staff by enhancing the development, performance, skills, and efficiency of all types of employees. You can grow your small business, boost your company’s goals, or fully align your organization’s internal and external department strategies by automating various workforce processes in the background.
For call centers — similar to software for the event-management industry — overstaffing is a thing of the past. You can create and adjust employee schedules quickly and accurately with the right scheduling software that has tailored, fine-tuned functionality that’s specifically built for today’s call center industry.
Scheduling, Forecasting, and Call Center Workforce Management Software
You can easily create team schedules. They can be constructed in just a few clicks with drag and drop scheduling convenience. Schedules don’t have to be built from scratch. Instead, you can keep schedules consistent by creating templates or copying and pasting shifts. Also, breaks are easy to schedule and manage, and you can build schedules by indicating break times for each shift.
You can also know how many employees you need — the exact number. Call center workforce management software lets you use your existing systems to obtain accurate forecasts based on call volume, tickets expected, and call-agent skills.
Even more: With ready-made report templates, you can identify trends and potential problems. You’ll be able to make your own reports based on the metrics you care about, as well as find out when employees need training and development by using reporting insights.
Your system will also be adaptable to last-minute changes in scheduling. You can make sure you don’t miss a leave request. With today’s leave-management systems and functionality, you can see and approve requests in a single click. Staff who aren’t available shouldn’t be scheduled. Whenever you schedule a shift, platforms can show you if an employee is unavailable. In addition, shift-swapping tools let you fill unexpected absences, and employees can apply for open shifts. You’ll just need to keep an eye on the costs of swaps and stay within your budget.
Additional Modern Benefits: Call Center Workforce Management Software
Today’s call center workforce management software comes with so many other modern benefits and conveniences, such as:
- You can work with your current human resources systems. Workforce management operations are faster and more efficient, and frontline teams have robust scheduling and attendance tools.
- Call agents can be chosen more astutely. Agents need to be assigned to shifts to meet your operational needs, but overworked and stressed agents sometimes aren’t performing at their best. That’s why a delicate balance is needed. This is a great tool to help alleviate overworked agents. The schedule is based on agents’ performance, call handling ability, tenure, and other factors.
- Assigning agents by shift-bidding alone isn’t the end-all answer. Your scheduling process needs to incorporate agent preferences and business policies to maximize engagement. Handling all of these variables manually is not only time-consuming, and it’s also taxing.
- Management of day-to-day operations and stress. A final component in one’s call center workforce management software cycle is making sure the center is staffed properly during its scheduled hours. It’s important to re-forecast to ensure service levels are being met when the unexpected happens. Making sure staffing levels match the revised forecast is part of managing your entire business day, and making sure agents actually do what they’re scheduled to do is part of that too (also known as adherence). Most call centers track adherence — some at the team level and others at the individual level. Setting adherence targets is important, no matter how your system is set up. It used to be a very manual and time-consuming process until workforce management solutions made it easier.
Meeting Your Exact Service Level Needs
Let’s home-in on scheduling and forecasting. A lack of staff can cost more than overstaffing because it means poor customer service, a negative brand image, and a loss of customers. Workforce turnover and agent burnout can cause missed services levels, abandoned calls, and lost revenue. While staying compliant, call center workforce management software manages appropriate staffing levels and reduces staffing costs.
To achieve service level goals, call centers must manage their workforces to reduce costs and make sure customers get what they want. Despite that, nearly half of contact centers don’t use a modern workforce management solution. Manual scheduling is becoming outdated as call centers get bigger and more complex. Transactions can now happen across multiple channels, so agents need to handle more than one type. It’s impossible to meet these evolving needs with spreadsheets and archaic methods.
With today’s modern online platforms and dashboards, you can forecast and create schedules, assign agents, and monitor and manage daily workloads. You’ll have lower operational costs, higher service level performance, and better customer service. You can also automate the process of creating, accessing, and managing error-free timecards and schedules with call center workforce management software, so you can get rid of paper and save time.
Supporting Your Call Center Champions
Take a step back, though. It’s important to also consider the world of call center staff and the tools they increasingly need on the frontend (as opposed to the human resources backend) as contact centers move into 2023.
Improved contact center solutions let agents help more customers. Most of these interactions are high-value and support company growth. A digital solution can also be reliable 24-7 if it’s designed and implemented the right way. Self-service operations make it easy to keep an eye on performance and alert managers when something needs to be done. In addition, automated tools add consistency to company messaging in communications between a firm and its customers. Plus, contact centers can now engage and impress customers with sonic branding as audio assets can be tapped into. Even though these may differ (thanks to artificial intelligence-enabled feature matching), they all reflect an organization’s core values of trust, clarity, and commitment. Also, fraud detection, self-service, and synthetic voices and models all tie-in the entire structure.
All the while, call center workforce management software in the background supports your call agent champions in the foreground.
Additionally, every contact center employee deserves purpose within career development, happiness, and productivity, also known as their “why.” Burnout is likely if these aspects aren’t taken care of. Employee happiness and productivity depend on having the flexibility to step away in customer service roles. A number of technologies are available for contact center agents — especially those with cloud-based properties — that business leaders should implement to help them establish a better work-life balance. An intelligent virtual agent (IVA) can handle mundane, repetitive calls, which allows human agents to focus on the harder stuff. At a basic level, workforce management technologies give agents more flexibility in scheduling while allowing them to plan ahead. Customer service can be maintained seamlessly. Using artificial intelligence to future-proof against the next workplace concern is top of mind today, as well as using AI to adjust and accommodate agent workflows.
Once again, call center workforce management software on the human resources side is the foundation for these efficiencies — and so much more. On the outer edges and from a workforce management perspective, it aids in implementation of the call center’s automated scheduling, customer interaction, sales and marketing, forecasting, virtual queuing, workflow, SMS text messaging capabilities, improved customer satisfaction, increased employee satisfaction, a higher first-call resolution rate, error elimination, and cost reduction.
VCS Software
VCS Software is your all-in-one solutions platform for call center workforce management software whether your business, company, or public agency or department is large, medium, or small. VCS Software provides the right solutions within human resources — and so much more.