TMCnews Featured Article
May 11, 2012
Call Center Managers Find Most Challenges in Balancing On and Off Call Activities, According to Knowlagent Survey
By Katie Gatto, TMCnet Contributor
If you, or your company, run a call center then you know how much of a challenge it can be to get and keep things running smoothly. While many call centers, such as tech support, do have their own unique issues to deal with there are some commonalities to be found in call centers across the nation.
Researchers at Knowlagent, a company best known for its work in the management of call centers, commissioned a survey to find out just what kinds of problems are common in call centers and the results may surprise you. The survey was conducted with the help of roughly 400 members of workforce management teams. The survey had two goals, to figure out what the biggest blocks to productivity in call centers was, and to find out the biggest problems with workers satisfaction and scheduling.
Results of the survey showed that, according to the perceptions of the managers, the biggest problem in call centers was finding a balance between the level of service that agents have to provide when they are on the phone and the administrative tasks that need to be taken care of when the agent is not fielding calls from customers. A majority of managers, 65.7 percent, cited this as their biggest problem. The next largest concern, dubbed, "forecasting and staffing processes" by the survey, was on the minds of 59.1 percent of the managers, with 85 percent saying that they would like the ability to better forecast and staff their call centers with a higher level of accuracy.
Matt McConnell, president and CEO of Knowlagent, said the following about the results of the survey in the company’s official release, "Workforce management teams have a lot of moving parts to contend with when developing schedules that keep agents productive and satisfied, while meeting service levels throughout fluctuating call volumes. The survey results echo some of the frustrations we repeatedly hear about the challenges of making intraday management efficient through manual processes."
The company has yet to release the full results of the report to the general public, but hopes to do so at some point in the near future.
Edited by Brooke Neuman
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