Workforce management: How to move from "reactive" to "proactive" call center performance management?

Performance Management Dashboard

Performance management is a critical part of managing call centers and is essential to help you align your people, processes and systems to your goals and objectives, such as customer satisfaction, cost control and revenue goals. Many call centers lack the means to measure and track their key performance indicators (KPI) necessary to improve forecasting, staffing, scheduling and adherence. There is a trend of transforming call center performance management from a reactive to a more proactive approach. Scorecards, key performance indicators, real-time alerts, agent analytics, dashboards, and customizable reports deliver a constant stream of actionable intelligence helping managers and supervisors make more informed decisions faster, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, more cost control and better utilization of resources. Here are just a few benefits:

• Better decisions through actionable intelligence and flexible real-time dashboards: Gives management a unified view to monitor and analyze key performance metrics, such as agent adherence, service levels, labor costs and staffing resulting in more informed decisions.
• Improved productivity and agent motivation through scorecard capabilities: Motivates agents to self-manage their performance and take action with coaches and supervisors based on real data and KPI’s (key performance indicators) to meet business objectives, creating a culture of accountability and self-motivation.
• Easy and fast access to key performance indicators: Frees up time for supervisors and managers to focus on working with agents, coaching, training and planning, instead of collecting and analyzing data.

To learn more about agent analytics and performance management please take a look at our website or download our Monet Metrics brochure as part of the WFM Success Kit.

What is schedule adherence and why is it important in the call center?

Schedule adherence is the degree to which agents stick to their schedules, measured as a percentage. Considering that staffing is the single biggest cost facing any call center – and that every minute counts when it comes to meeting customer service levels – it’s easy to see why call center managers are putting an increasing emphasis on improving it.
 
If you run a small call center with 5 to 20 agents, you might think schedule adherence isn’t all that important. But if you take a closer look at all the different junctures throughout the day where agent time is “lost,” you’ll realize that it can add up to a serious loss of revenue over the course of a year.

Schedule adherence is particularly important for ensuring smooth transitions between shifts. Call center schedules tend to be very complex – which means there can be a lot of junctures during a shift where an agent will go out of adherence. For example, an agent might show up for his shift five minutes late; log on to the ACD seven minutes late; show up for a training session eight minutes late; and go over their break time by 10 minutes - resulting in the agent being a total of 30 minutes out of adherence for that one shift. Multiply these “out of adherence” events across a center with dozens if not hundreds of agents - and then multiply that by the total number of shifts - and its easy to see how schedule adherence can quickly become a serious problem.

Keeping track of schedule adherence using manual systems such as spreadsheets can be incredibly time-consuming and challenging. This is where today’s web-based call center scheduling solutions are playing an increasingly crucial role. They track schedule adherence in real-time and and automatically send you alerts.

When implementing a new program for improving schedule adherence in your call center - perhaps through the deployment of a workforce management system - it’s a good idea to discuss those changes with your employees first. The one thing you don’t want is a negative backlash from your valued employees, who might not be all that thrilled to be working under the watchful eye of “Big Brother.”

In order to reduce any negative backlash from your agents when implementing a new program to improve schedule adherence, you must first “inform and educate.” Agents need to understand the relevance of schedule adherence, how a mere 10 minutes here and there impacts other agents and the entire call center performance.

Then you should “measure and manage:” Measure and track adherence using workforce management tools and solutions, tracking adherence in real-time and running reports. Share these adherence reports with your agents and discuss how they are doing. It is important to give regular feedback regarding adherence statistics.

Finally, you can provide “incentives.” Reward agents that adhere to their schedule (95 percent within adherence scores) through recognition within the team and tie bonuses to good scores. It is also critical that all agents are aware of the consequences for out-of-adherence behavior, as this establishes their responsibility towards the success of the call center.

For more information, please read our 5 Strategies for improved Schedule Adherence whitepaper.

Workforce management unified with call recording

It’s common knowledge that call recording software is a powerful tool for businesses to accurately capture voice conversations with their customers. However, when  combined with call center workforce management, call recording makes it easy and efficient for call centers to optimize operational efficiencies, employee satisfaction, and the overall customer experience—a combination that takes call recording to a whole new level. Here are the key benefits:

Improve service quality
One of the most critical differences call recording software can make is improving the quality of customer service. It is impossible hover over each individual agent at all times to ensure the service they’re providing is up to company standards. Even if this were feasible, the discrepancy of how agents handle themselves while knowingly being monitored would be ever-present.

More effective and personalized training
With call recordings, managers and call center trainers have the means to not only measure their agents’ ability to adhere to company-approved responses, but to gauge how they’re performing in terms of efficiency, courtesy, and conversational style.With call recording, the training can be personalized and customized to the needs of every agent, making it more effective and efficient. Call monitoring also allows for ongoing, situation-specific training that will guide agents through best practices for a range of customer interactions. Recorded conversations can also be compiled into groups for training purposes.

Increase revenues and profits
With improved training comes improved service, and with improved service, it only makes sense that a boost in profits is close behind in the form of more up-sells, customer loyalty, repeat business, and new sales, less employee turnover, and faster training.

Ensure compliance and avoid lawsuits
Compliance is an important requirement for many businesses, especially those in the financial services industry that are continuously monitored by private and government entities whose job it is to regulate the handling of private financial information.

Improve customer satisfaction
The ability to monitor, score, and dissect past and current calls gives managers more control over how their agents engage customers. Managers can monitor conversations on the spot and address any issues that may be negatively impacting performance metrics. Call recording also allows unhappy customers to be addressed immediately, before they may want to file a complaint.

For more information about this topic, please also see our call recording blog.

Workforce management software for call centers: How to convince your executive team

Persuading senior management to change “business-as-usual” call center systems can be a difficult undertaking. A challenging economic environment puts pressure on all areas of the organization to implement solutions that reduce costs and increase revenues—all while improving performance and productivity. As each solution competes for investment dollars, only a select few offering the highest ROI will obtain funding.

Here are three key steps to make your case:

• Business impact: What does it “cost” you to continue using manual processes or spreadsheets? Please see also our posts about spreadsheet based contact center scheduling and the cost of out-of-adherence.
• Benefits: What are the key benefits you can realize with a WFM solution? Please see how does WFM impact call center staffing and the ROI of Workforce Management Software.
• ROI: What is the return or payback time for the WFM investment? A common misconception is that WFM software is associated with a large investment. In fact, new cloud-based WFM can deliver significant value to the top and bottom line with a minimal investment. A cloud-based WFM solution provides the highest ROI and savings of any WFM strategy due to its low upfront investment and low operating costs. Please read WFM software comparison - cloud versus installed software.

If you need help presenting the benefits of an automated WFM solution to your management team please see our workforce management ROI white papers or contact us and we are happy to answer your questions, share some ROI tools and provide guidance.

Contact Center Scheduling and Forecasting Functionality

What are the key functional components of a scheduling and forecasting solution for a contact center? Here is a quick overview:

• Forecasting: Ability to run simulations to calculate a precise forecast for future call volume, agent requirements and average handle time for any time interval of the day, based on historical data from your ACD system.
  
• Scheduling: The scheduling module should incorporate all call types and other call and non-call related activities to generate staffing schedules that optimize a wide range of factors, including agent availability, skills, holidays, breaks, training and service levels.
  
• Exception handling: Integrated exception calendar to simplify scheduling of agent exceptions such as time off and one-time or recurring training meetings.
  
• Real-time adherence: Ability to compare planned agent activity to actual activities throughout the day, as well as real-time views of forecast and actual call volumes, handle times and other key performance indicators.
• Intra-day management: Graphical display of agents' schedules with drag-and-drop functionality to quickly manage breaks, lunches and other exceptions. Real-time updates can be made to required and assigned agents instantly, and display surpluses and shortages for each time period of the day.
  
• Agent - supervisor collaboration: Enables easy and efficient agent-supervisor interaction and collaboration, such as exceptions, schedule bids or swap requests and critical reports. Agents get empowered to be more directly involved in the scheduling process by entering exceptions or bids and viewing their schedules at any time.
  
• Configuration & administration: Ability to set up unlimited number of center splits or agent groups, each with its own set of service objectives and guidelines. Management of multiple sites and time zones. Ability to set hours of operation by day of week, and service level goals down to 15-minute intervals if desired.
  
• Metrics and reporting: Ability to report and analyze all agent activities including their schedule adherence and key performance indicators. Managers need to get actionable insights through tools such as call center dashboards, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and real-time alerts.

If you are interested in seeing a solution in action, please take a look at a contact center forecasting and scheduling demo on our website.

Making Workforce Optimization Easy and Affordable

We are very excited that Monet Software and our new solution suite Monet WFO Live was featured in the March 2012 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions with the title "Making Workforce Optimization Easy and Affordable". Here are some highlights from the article:

“Call centers can now quickly and easily optimize all aspects of their workforce with one affordable solution, resulting in better utilization of resources, better cost management and improved service levels,” Chuck Ciarlo explains. “Monet WFO Live unifies workforce optimization across multiple processes to better meet customer needs and deliver more effective customer service. Customers can create accurate forecasts, efficient schedules for work volumes, track key metrics in accordance to their business goals, record and monitor calls for quality, training and compliance purpose, all in one integrated cloud-based platform.”

Ciarlo added that “Monet is leading the call center workforce technology cloud by addressing some major industry trends”:

• "Customers are looking for one stop shopping and for a fully integrated WFO solution to take advantage of synergies across multiple functions.
  
• The adoption of cloud-based software is further accelerating due to proven value: scalable, security, low cost, ease of use, and fast implementation.
• Call centers want to move from a reactive to proactive mode of operation with goal settings, dashboards, triggers, and alerts to further optimize resources”.

Monet WFO Live consists of a handful of software modules, including Monet WFM, Monet Record, Monet Quality, and Monet Metrics.

Click here to read the full cover story.

Workforce Management + Call Recording + Quality Management

We are very excited to announce the availability of Monet Record and Monet Quality, expanding our Workforce Management (WFM) offering to a unified Workforce Optimization (WFO) suite. Now, call centers can easily and efficiently automate workforce management, call recording, quality management with one affordable solution. Here is a quick overview of the new solution components:

Monet Record - Call Recording for Compliance & Quality Assurance
Monet Record provides an easy and affordable web-based solution to record, archive and retrieve customer interactions to better monitor call quality and gain more business insights. Call centers can improve their customer service while ensuring adherence to regulations & policies and easier resolution of transaction disputes and other service related issues.

Monet Quality – Call Center Quality Management to Boost Productivity and Service Quality
Monet Quality is a flexible solution to evaluate the performance of contact center agents. It helps call centers improve agent effectiveness and optimize customer interactions through a range of capabilities, such as call assessment and playback, quality monitoring, call quality scoring, evaluation questionnaires and detailed reporting.

For more information please see the press release on our website and our new call recording blog.

Extend the value of workforce management software with call recording

The goal of workforce management is to create a more productive work environment through the planning, management tracking and analysis of such vital activities as agent performance, forecasting, scheduling, and adherence. 

With call recording software solutions, it’s possible to capture valuable intelligence from agent-customer interactions, and thus improve both service levels and service quality / sales conversions. Data gathered from customer contacts makes it easier to forecast the length of future calls, find out why some calls take longer, and respond accordingly with training or changes in procedure. Call recording software can also assist with assessment of agents’ skills and performances, allowing for skill-based routing and scheduling. Please read more about this topic on our call recording and monitoring blog.