Call Center Schedule 101 - tips, tools and best practices

Every call center has different scheduling requirements. However, there are some tips and best practices that apply to most of them. Here you go:

• Special days and holidays scheduling: Take a look at how to forecast and schedule special days.
  
• What activities to schedule? All activities that are relevant should be included into your schedule. Here is how you include all agent activities into the schedule
  
• Full/part time and flex worker: Learn how to best schedule full/part time and flex workers
  
• Multiple channels: If you communicate with your customers through multiple channels (phone, email, chat, etc.) you need to forecast and schedule for multiple channels
  
• Shift bidding & trading: Improve agent motivation, while getting some more flexibility into your schedule through automated shift bidding and trading. This is especially easy when you use a web-based tool that allows agents and supervisor to collaborate on shift bidding and trading.
  
• Skill based scheduling and routing: How to use skill-based routing and scheduling to reduce the number of agents needed to handle your call volume.
  
• Flexible start- and end-times: Allow agents to come in later (an hour or two) or to work longer hours on certain days (based on the needs of the call center and based on their personal needs). However, this needs to get administered properly to make sure hours don't "get lost". In addition, as posted to this blog, there are other ways to provide more flexibility.

And finally, if you are looking for a quick summary here is a document with 7 tips for improved scheduling you can download.