Workforce Management: Session Descriptions
Contact Center Dynamics: An Overview of Workforce Management in the Call Center
The contact center can be a confusing place. There are acronyms, measurements, statistics, and processes that are unique to this function. But it doesn’t need to be a mystery. In this session, you’ll learn about the business of the inbound call center, its stakeholders and goals. You’ll hear about the critical tradeoffs between staffing, service, and cost and how each of these tradeoffs affects the final schedules and intraday adjustment processes. Attendees will also learn the impact that every person can make in terms of achieving service goals while maintaining the critical balance with cost, customer and staff retention.
Setting Strategic Goals for Workforce Management
Just like the organization as a whole and the contact center within it, the Workforce Management department needs to have strategic goals that define the direction for the team. Clearly set overall goals make short-term decisions easier and performance more consistent. In this session, you will learn: the 10 most common goals; definitions and applications; implications of different calculations; trade-offs when goals create conflicts; and the essentials of creating a strategic plan.
Fundamental Concepts of Scheduling with Skill-Based Routing
Balancing customer, center, and agent needs with traditional scheduling is not easy, but adding skill-based routing to the process can make it significantly more complex. New hires may have only one skill when they first start handling calls, while more seasoned staff may have a wide range of skills. When each agent may have a different combination of skills and perform them at different levels, the optimized schedule needs to reflect these possibilities. Add different levels of priority of callers to the mix and then figure out how to adjust when a multi-skilled agent is missing. These are the challenges of scheduling in a skill-based routing environment. This session will outline ways to minimize the challenges not only in the schedules but also in the intraday management process that follows.
Building Blocks of Scheduling
In this session, attendees will learn about the fundamental concepts, questions to ask, and decisions to make about building a successful schedule plan. Hear about schedule components and discuss important trade-offs about shift types, days on/off patterns, break and lunch placements, and scheduling off-phone activities, just to name a few. Review the fundamental scheduling definitions, along with new ideas about how a few simple changes can make your schedules a better match of workforce to workload.