A Paradigm Shift for the Contact Center
Planning can be a thankless task. We spend years, months preparing, and then an unforeseen event throws everything into disarray.
Think about any event you’ve attended, like a football match or a concert. When things go well, no one thinks about the planning. But when things go wrong, planners face scrutiny.
In the contact center, planning is essential, but even the best-laid plans can unravel when the unexpected happens. When I worked at an insurance company, we collaborated with a weather forecaster to predict claim surges. This helped allocate resources more effectively for spikes in demand. But the meteorologist shared an important insight: they couldn’t predict weather beyond five days. If we can’t predict precipitation six days out, how can we forecast call, email, or chat volumes?
Flexible working arrangements are essential for modern contact centers, but how flexible are your schedules for fully flexible agents? Rotas often require agents to work undesirable shifts, while schedule preferences and bidding can lead to oversubscription during certain times, disappointing agents who don’t get the shifts they want.
Tools like shift moves and shift exchanges can help, yet the industry has moved on. Offering flexibility on schedules that don’t match call distribution is like getting a box of chocolates with all your favorites missing. You have the product, but it doesn’t satisfy.
Flexibility in contact centers usually happens during overstaffed periods, but would you allow it during understaffed ones? Probably not. Yet the best contact centers, like the best sports teams, are agile. So let’s challenge our conventional thinking.
Creating the Paradigm Shift
Agent Flex introduces a new way for our workforce to adjust their schedules to better suit their lives.
For example, let’s consider an employee who is coming towards the latter end of her pregnancy. This employee is unable to work on Wednesday evenings for the next few weeks, as she has essential appointments she must attend, but is available on a Saturday morning.
With the traditional approach, to get approval on her shift change, the employee would have to speak with her manager, who in turn needs to speak with planning. Planning then needs to approve or decline the request and communicate that back to the manager. The manager then needs to have a conversation with the employee. A four-step process whilst the agent is waiting for an answer.
If Wednesdays are a challenging period for the contact center, where it consistently fails to achieve its targets, planning is likely to reject the request. Even if there is some negotiation between operations and planning, which results in the request being approved, consider the time and stress inflicted upon this agent.
But what if we’re predicting that while ten customers will be left unanswered on Wednesday evening, fifty customers will be unanswered on a Saturday morning? How would those figures influence our decisions?
By enabling the shift change from Wednesday evening to Saturday morning, with just the click of a button, you could give this employee true flexibility, and create a better overall experience for your customer. That’s what QStory’s Agent Flex provides.
While forecasts and schedules are important, the ability to adapt is key. With QStory’s Agent Flex, we’re not just improving contact center operations; we’re redefining what true workforce agility looks like.
Craig Lee, Customer Success Consultant, QStory
If you’re ready to make flexibility work for your agents and your customers, get in touch with us at hello@qstory.ai!