How to Manage a Call Centre Workforce

With the current financial squeeze, companies, both big and small, are having to monitor their expenditure more closely than ever. One area where money can be saved is staffing, so it’s vital that companies manage to optimize their personnel resource.

Take call centres, for example. Here’s a prime example of a working environment in which you often see high staff turnover along with tens if not hundreds of different staff members on various shifts throughout a working day. Imperative to the success and profitability of a call centre is ensuring the right number of staff are in place to deliver on numerous tasks such as answering incoming calls, placing outbound calls and responding to emails. Employee scheduling is a difficult task, especially in a working environment of this nature, and getting the staffing balance right is essential. Overstaffing can result in a needless spending of budget whilst understaffing would also be detrimental to staff morale and, in turn, contribute towards a higher staff turnover.

Workforce management can be tricky for even the most experienced of managerial teams, but a workforce management software package can help with a whole host of issues. By using an online cloud-based system, it can help call centre managerial teams with all factors of staffing including scheduling, annual leave, staff information, along with individual and team productivity reports. Generally, call centres have now got increasingly complex scheduling environments, for example longer working days, increased volume of emails and more and more employees working part-time hours. Many hours of staff time are lost in most call centres due to excessive amounts of non-productive time. A workforce management software package provides historical and real-time scheduling information, reducing workforce shrinkage by an estimated 2-5% in most call centres.

Get Scheduled’s employee management software can be used for call centres of any size with the varying prices dependent on the number of users. This method of managing your workforce is far more cost-effective than employing a member of staff to overlook everything. The fact that the software can work for a variety of different budgets and team sizes means it is not inaccessible to anyone. Rather than estimate and rely on spreadsheets to predict how many employees are required for various shifts, this cloud-based system has the ability to create custom reports that, in turn, help increase productivity by providing up-to-date and detailed information on your workforce