Intraday management is arguably one of the top priorities of a call center’s operations. Managing and maintaining the day-to-day operations of a facility is undoubtedly crucial; however, it’s not as easy as it seems. The process can bring along some unique challenges, evidenced by the fact that call center managers recently agreed on four challenging areas in a recent study. In this article, we will detail two of those challenges and address the others in part two.
The Challenge: Intraday staffing
The process of managing and forecasting call center personnel schedules throughout the day is, understandably, the core of every call center. Most managers revealed that they were still handling this onerous task manually. Of managers dealing with chronic understaffing, 42 percent of those were assigning staff entirely by a manual method and 16 percent were using a mixture of manual and automated staffing. For those call center executives who found their centers regularly overstaffed, 39 percent of those staffed manually and 14.5 percent used a mixture of manual and automated systems.
The Challenge: Queue management
Though many ACDs claim to smooth out the bumps in call traffic flow, 27 percent of queue management was left to be dealt with manually and another 32 percent was being handled by a mixture of some sort of automation mixed with manual management. Again, this is yet another example of mismanaged resources, which reduces managers to glorified jugglers in a bad balancing act, and customer service to a circus act in itself.
Transitioning to more advanced call center solutions could be the key you need to unlock these pestering challenges. In fact, only 9 percent of call centers found themselves still wrestling with overstaffing after making the switch and only 3 percent found themselves dealing with understaffing—a tremendous drop from the use of manual or partially manual systems.
Handling the problems of intraday scheduling and queue management are unnecessary struggles once the proper automated system is put in place, increasing both customer (and call center managers’) satisfaction.
To learn more about call center solutions for improved intraday management, click here.
