The Importance of Call Center Leadership for Workforce Management

Posted by Ahmed Macklai on January, 23 2020 8:29 pm

Nearly $700 billion is wasted by American businesses every year doing what can be considered unnecessary administrative tasks. These tasks are small or simple enough that automation could handle them, saving these businesses valuable time and money. However, too many businesses neglect to automate the many small tasks that software could be handling for them - including workforce management.

Why Automate Your Workforce Management?

Today’s contact center is a busy place. There is so much information to handle, so many employees to manage. Balancing it all can be enough to spin a person’s head.

Thankfully, many of the most time-consuming tasks that are required of call center managers can be handled by automated processes and programs, today. This includes workforce management, the process by which your contact center ensures that it has the correct number of agents available to handle the projected amount of calls coming in or going out.

Creating and managing a schedule for your employees doesn’t have to be difficult. Even if you have a very large payroll list, you can manage it effectively with the right tools. Automation makes it a quick and painless process - and saves the sanity of your call center management team.

Automated workforce management programs use a system that includes data analyzation and forecasting. This takes past call loads and uses that information to predict what kind of workload your agents can expect in upcoming days and weeks. This helps to create a better picture of how many agents will be required for specific dates and times and makes creating a sensible schedule easier.

These programs go several steps further in helping to create workable schedules. They also analyze several other metrics, including the number of agents you have available at any given time to schedule, the occupancy rate goal your center aims for, the average speed of answer your agents have, the average handling time of typical calls, and more. Taking all of this into consideration these programs generate ideal schedules to cover entire days, weeks, or even months. They can then be adjusted as needed, for things like agent-requested leave, seasonal fluctuations, and more.

The automation of these processes makes creating complicated schedules simpler - and saves your management team a lot of time and stress.

Automation Isn’t Everything

While automation of processes that can be streamlined is important in minimizing expenses, it isn’t the only way to maximize productivity - especially when it comes to scheduling and workforce management.

The truth is, the human element of your workforce plays a significant part in your success. This is especially true when it comes to members of your contact center’s management team. Adequate leadership has more impact on employee attendance, schedule adherence, and the effectiveness of scheduling than almost any other element you could focus on.

People want to see themselves reflected in the leaders of their company and community. This is why politicians try to relate to voters and why big corporations spend millions every year on ad campaigns that they hope will strike a chord with viewers and paying consumers. It’s all about giving those you are marketing to a way to see themselves in a positive light in relation to your products or service.

When you empower employees to rise through the ranks into leadership positions among their peers, you are doing the same thing - without spending millions of dollars, of course. You are showing your staff that success is something that any of them can achieve - and that doing so requires hard work and faithful work attendance. Leadership among peers is more likely to make this happen than any software program you could possibly purchase.

How Leadership Factors Into Better Workforce Management

Effective workforce management is nothing without implementation. Many centers find that despite their best efforts to schedule employees effectively, agent attendance issues lave them ineffectively staffed.

So, how can you prevent this in your center? It begins with strong leadership. Your managers should be leading by example in all aspects of performance, but especially when it comes to attendance and schedule adherence. Demonstrating the importance of being faithful to the schedule and diligent in work attendance is a great way to leaders within your center to motivate others to do the same. It’s one thing for management team members to give speeches about the importance of coming to work. It’s another, more effective thing for fellow employees to demonstrate that all-important work ethic themselves.

Leaders in your contact center should also be the first to accept and implement new technology, including software solutions that help to make workforce management easier. When you need to monitor agents more closely and analyze their output more effectively, integrating the tools to do so into your everyday operations can cause some agents to become uncomfortable. No one likes to feel like they are being unnecessarily scrutinized. This is when it is up to your leaders to make agents feel more comfortable with new processes and programs and help to explain the necessity of these procedures.

Always be sure to reward your leaders with incentives that make going the extra mile worth it. This doesn’t just make working harder more worthwhile for these team leaders. IT also makes it more desirable for those who model their own workplace behavior after them. When you offer incentives, your employees will work more happily - and exceed your expectations every time!

If you and your management team are looking for ways to simplify and streamline workforce management in your facility without detracting from the importance of the human element, talk to the industry experts at ChaseData. We have the tools and technology to make every day easier for your managers and staff, from better and more intuitive scheduling to integration and implementation that makes more sense for your team. Let us help you make more sense of workforce management and let your leaders focus on shining - give us a call today to learn more!

Recent Posts