A Fresh Look At Call Center Workforce Management Part II

Written by KOVA Corp

Call center staff are the make-or-break component to any call center.

Last time we looked at three ways to reexamine and reinvigorate call center workforce management. Here are three other ways to improve your call center’s performance.

1. Make Action A Priority. The relationship between staff and management is dynamic and reciprocal. If efforts are one sided, loss of trust will soon follow – and restoring trust is hard to achieve, making lapses both inefficient and costly.

To make mentoring a reality, there has to be action on management’s part. When agents bring concerns or complaints, it is important to realize this is a challenge to the fundamental relationship that is at the heart of every call center: staff and management.

No matter if the complaints aren’t actionable – validating the process is necessary to maintaining the relationship.

Whenever possible act on suggestions and complaints that come from your staff. Show them that their frontline experience is important to the call center’s function.

2. Fairness And Flexibility. Agents want a balance between work and life. Allowing for flexible scheduling arrangements can be a strong promoter of your call center team’s work satisfaction.

A great way to build moral is shift bidding and swapping. Unfilled shifts are offered to qualified agents. They can then bid for shifts, allowing them to volunteer for shift times otherwise outside their preferred work day. Managers can select among bidders, ensuring a willing agent that is the best fit for the shift in question. In a similar way, allowing some swapping of shifts on a volunteer basis can help boost moral

Providing a clear process for schedule changes is necessary to prevent chaos and preserve benefits.

3. No Man Is An Island. Finally, there is the critical role of the manager. The call center personifies workforce management more than in other industries. He completes the equation between satisfied customers and satisfied staff.

Because the burdens of call center management are heavy and diverse, workforce management software is indispensible to achieving goal realization. The time investment in mentoring and other reaffirmative personal contact with staff makes a manger’s time precious.

KOVA’s Enterprise Workforce Optimization solutions are based on the need for mangers to have a swift, efficient, and easy means of tracking the great variety of tasks they must perform every day.

Impact360, KOVA’s workforce management software, can automate staff training according to a wide variety of performance indicators or scorecards – it even lets staff schedule training sessions on their own initiatives. Scheduling too can be automated, allowing you to assign times for meeting or training with a minimum of disruption to service. Our software solutions can provide automatic compliance with any governmental, union, or time-banking regulations.

Customer satisfaction and feedback can be captured with Impact360. Our solutions allow you to achieve and analyze a wide selection of data. And most importantly, Impact360 can reduce costs, promoting truly cost-effective service, while delivering actionable insights to your business.

Call center staff is the single most expensive and most critical element of any call center. By enriching the relationship between management and staff, customer service can be brought to outstanding levels of satisfaction. KOVA’s workforce management software can streamline this process making for a better team. And a strong team makes your business stronger and more agile.

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