What's the best way to ensure your call center is properly staffed for customer demand?

One thing that I have found helpful with metrics is using Stephen Covey's Four Disciplines of Execution. Call Center and Workforce Management are full of Lags (Result oriented metrics) and few focus on the Leads (Business Process oriented metrics). A Lag measure tells you if you achieved the goal and a lead measure identifies if you are likely to achieve the goal. Service level, Avg Speed of Answer, Abandon Rate, and Occupancy are often focused on but a result of your staffing. Focusing on areas within WFM that are controllable and process oriented provides employees areas of focus and achievement. At the end of the day the # of resources you have Surplus or Deficit matters most and is the best indicator of overall goal achievement.

If I learnt something about forecasting is that forecasts are always live. You can run your forecast based on historical records and seasonality patterns, but there will always be some unexpected inputs that may affect. So it is extremely important to have a constant communication with all the actors involved in anything that may create contacts in your contact center - marketing for campaigns, product for new buttons in the UI... and so on. Also, even seasonality can be altered by the macro and other external factors. It is key as well to stay informed of what's happening in the outside world, and be able to determine if anything may have an impact in our company's activities.

Having a specialized call center staffing partner who is consistently building talent pipelines for your organization gives you the opportunity to scale based on volume year round and will also reduce your cost per hire.

Staffing for demand has always been a concern for call centers. Whether it’s finding staff or just getting your staff to show up. When you have seasonal spikes it becomes even more challenging. It doesn’t matter if you are an in house center or outsource center. You deal with staffing issues. Rather than pass my staffing problems to a BPO, who deals with the same issues of hiring, attendance and utilization, I chose to go with a customer-led conversational voice assistant. It handles about 30% of my calls immediately without no wait and no need to go to an agent. It works 24x7, handles spikes, doesn’t call out and is 100% utilized (only pay when it is taking a call). I could not be happier with the performance. Much better than BPO.