Our customers are telling us that what’s needed in call centres is the technology to enable flexibility working conditions to be able to support individuals’ work/life balance preferences.
The call centre industry is renowned for being inflexible for their agents. There’s the stereotypical view of people being chained to their desks as they cover the phones at times that aren’t necessarily suited to their lifestyle – metaphorically of course. But we do know that agents’ shifts are fixed sometimes weeks in advance, and they often have little chance to change them
But it doesn’t have to be like that… with QStory there’s the capability to give employees more control to manage their shifts how it best suits them. At the click of a button (on their smartphone), they can request when they have their lunch so that it coincides with friend’s or their favourite gym class. When it comes to booking a holiday, there’s the age-old situation where they’ve missed out on the flights by the time the request for absence has been manually approved by their manager. With automatic holiday approval, based on real-time analytics, employees can go ahead and book a holiday within minutes of requesting time off.
Holidays, break-matching and flexibility are important to us all. But if we consider that call centres are staffed by millennials, then everything we’ve talked about becomes increasingly important.
If you work in call centre management, it’s worth reading this article from Smarp, which gives a great insight into millennials. As they account for about a quarter of the world’s population, maybe we should all be thinking about how best to attract and retain them.