As the geographical boundaries for doing business have gotten thin, some industries have witnessed stupendous growth due to this change. Call centre industry has been one of the major beneficiaries due to the same. This has led to a drastic change as professional call centre entities operating across the globe employ a large number of employees, considering the nature of its operations, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Many of the leading and upcoming business entities have realised that customers require assistance all the time, irrespective of time or day. Thus, a professional call centre agent should always be present to deliver quality service.
Apart from hiring a number of call centre executives in bulk, the managers are also assigned with the task of scheduling their working hours, have some temporary members on standby for peak seasons and deliver productive results by making effective use of their team members. It is important to note that workforce is a gigantic asset for a call centre solution provider, and more so for the ones specialising in an inbound call centre as the executives are at the forefront of making sure that customer needs are fulfilled. Hence, it becomes all the more imperative that their requirements are well managed if we want to ensure optimum levels of performance at all times.
Let us now enlist a list of challenges that managers of a call centre solution provider expects while managing their workforce.
High turnover rate
It is a well-known fact that call centre industry experiences the highest turnover across the globe. The higher turnover poses a huge challenge for the managers to manage their executives on floor. Especially during peak seasons, as much as 10% of the agents quit their jobs. A manager has to fill the gap by recruiting new employees, motivating and encouraging remaining employees so that they do not decide to quit like their previous colleagues and he/she also has to fulfill the documentation requirements of the remaining employees on a regular basis.
It is important to note that call centre operations go on all year round, therefore, we do not have the luxury to wait and see the progress of the remaining employees. A research conducted by a leading inbound call centre solution provider showcased that a majority of people quite their bosses, not their work as they need some income to fulfill their needs. Hence, it is recommended to create an environment that fosters cooperation between the managers and the call centre executives. A positive work environment will play a pivotal role in lowering the high turnover rate, thereby, making work a little easier to perform.
Workload forecasting
One major aspect of workforce management is forecasting agents’ workload and creating schedules for the staff. In an inbound call centre environment, if the management under-staffs the centre, customer satisfaction levels take a hit, and the executives are underwhelmed. On the other hand, it the management overstaffs the centre, executives will have idle time which will make them lethargic and the call centre will be wasting its resources.
The challenge lies in deriving the right balance in order to handle the workload, keeping in mind the service quality benchmarks of the industry by efficiently utilising least possible number of agents. It is a complex task to create a schedule that exactly matches the anticipated levels of workload. Hence, it is important to assess the background information about the workload by previous reports and efficiently utilise the information to forecast the plans and activities that influence the workload in future.
A high possibility of making errors
As there are varied tasks involved in workforce management, the chances of committing mistakes are considerably high. Right from the task of maintaining employee files to recording attendance to the documentation of expenses and the list carries on. The situation becomes uncontrollable if all these activities are done manually. It is important to understand the fact that, ‘to err is human, and that is bound to happen when an executive feels a sense of monotony has crept in his/her tedious manual work. But the fact of the matter is that the entire unit of a call centre is adversely affected by such mistakes.
Hence, in a reliable inbound call centre, it is even more important to effectively utilise the workforce management software available for our service that makes it easier for a manager to do scheduling, forecasting, tracking, measuring and other managerial tasks. The automation is bound to make our work fast and seamless, giving us more time to think about the welfare of our call centre executives.
It can be inferred from the above discussion that a call centre has plenty of challenges on their hands and proficient workforce management is bound to take them to greater heights.