Why Scheduling Should Be a Top Priority In Your Contact Center

For some contact centers, coverage can be a big issue. Too many agents costs too much. Too few agents costs even more -- in lost sales and lost loyalty. So predicting demand and staffing to match isn't just important -- it's crucial.

Here are a few reasons why you should pay attention to agent scheduling:

• Effective scheduling helps control costs, boost performance and raise agent retention rates.
• Scheduling is more complicated than it used to be thanks to more interaction channels and increasing use of remote agents.
• Forecasting demand requires intense data collection and analysis. As channels and customer expectations multiply, this task becomes more complex.

Tip: Automate scheduling and monitor volume spikes and lulls to adjust schedules and optimize efficiencies. This will ultimately help your management team be more productive, which gives them more time for coaching.

If you think all this data-crunching and schedule-massaging sounds difficult to achieve manually, you're right. Larger contact centers have frequently used automated workforce management tools to uncover patterns, create statistical models and forecast demand.

A good workforce management solution does most of the repetitive work involved in monitoring traffic and generating schedules, and this frees up supervisors and managers to spend more time on coaching. These solutions can also perform demand analyses in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take, so you can have accurately forecasted contact volumes -- and agent requirements based on those projections -- much earlier, and much more frequently.

Now, thanks to cloud technology, even small and midsize contact centers can take advantage of these same tools. Learn more about the Workforce Management solution offered by Five9, here.

For more info, read the full chapter, "Scheduling for maximum agent effectiveness," in the Agent Efficiency Guide: