Part 2 – Top Areas of Improvement for Call Center Intraday Management

When call center managers were asked about what needed the most improvement in their call centers, they mentioned four areas. The first two – intraday staffing and queue management –were discussed in part one of this series. Now, let’s move on to the last two challenges faced: Real-time monitoring and alerts and intraday task management.

The Challenge: Real-time monitoring and alerts

How does one monitor his or her staff to:

• Keep the proper amount of people working at any given time
• Manage those people (ensuring that calls are being answered promptly, customers concerns are being addressed efficiently and no calls are ever dropped)
• And alert employees both on-site and those off-site about changing working conditions?

In a recent study, 76 percent of call center managers reported that they were either managing everything manually or by an inefficient mixture of partial automation cobbled together with a manual system. Such a mishmash leads not only to call center inefficiency, but lots of extra stress on managers.

The Challenge: Intraday task management

Reducing staffers’ idle time was unanimously considered a problem. As of right now, approximately 11 percent of a call center agent’s entire work day is idle, made up of slivers of time about 2.5 minutes in length. Nearly 60 percent of call center managers believed that such time could be better distributed across call center employees, which could better improve both their quality of work life and the quality of customer service.

Transformative call center solutions that empower proper automation of time-sensitive processes are key to increasing a business’ impact. In fact, research shows it can impact a company’s bottom line by a full 24 percent by reducing labor costs, improving employee productivity and  increasing both customer and employee satisfaction.

To learn more about call center solutions for improved intraday management, click here.