Call centers have come a long way since their creation. What was once in place to handle live voice calls to and from customers has now morphed into multi-channel customer interaction centers that handle anywhere from thousands to millions of interactions every year.

Along with these advancements, call centers have also implemented technologies that enable the automatic routing of calls to the agent that is most skilled to handle each call. While this capability can improve customer service and create more efficiency in the call center, it does cause certain challenges when scheduling for the call center.

The call center must establish service level goals for each particular call type, yet it can be difficult for the manager to know if the best and more efficient schedules have been created. When trying to handle such a task manually, call center managers can spend a significant amount of time and still encounter problems.

An automated call center scheduling solution offers the capability of calculating the number of agents necessary to handle the forecasted call volumes. Such a solution can also estimate the handling times to provide a certain level of service for every time slot throughout the day.

When this process is complete, the call center manager can create schedules for a specific number of agents needed in each agent group. These groups are defined by the skills needed in the center and the skills provided by each agent. While agents can be part of more than one group, the groups are defined to specify the number of agents with a specific skill needed during a given time of day.

Proper call center scheduling is complete when the number of agents scheduled matches the number of agents needed for specific time periods throughout the day, week or month. The task becomes even more challenging when calls are scheduled to be routed to agents with more than one skill.

An automated call center scheduling solution can determine if the total number of multi-skilled agents scheduled matches the number of agents necessary for each call type. The automated system can measure the amount of time each agent is expected to handle each call type for specific time intervals.

March 18, 2009
Reposted by Uni-Ta