It can be challenging coming up with a staff schedule at the best of times. Once you add the holidays to the mix, creating a schedule that everyone likes can be next to impossible. It’s a busy time of year and many employees would like to spend at least some of the holiday season relaxing with their friends and families.
When it comes to creating a schedule that your employees will be happy with, it pays to find out what your staff want. When do they like to work? What motivates them to work certain shifts more than others? Here are a few tips to help you schedule holiday shifts with ease!
Ask Staff When They Like to Work
You might be surprised to find out what agents are looking for in a schedule. Some employees enjoy working the shifts that others might consider to be undesirable. Make sure you ask your employees what their preferred shift times are. If you can’t give them their preferred shifts all the time, at least try and sneak some in once in a while to keep your staff happy.
Offer Premiums for Undesirable Shifts
Many employees are motivated by higher pay. Offering premiums for graveyard and other undesirable shifts is a great way to entice employees to take those shifts. You can also offer extra pay (above and beyond what the law requires) for employees who work holidays.
Schedule Vacation Time Based on Seniority
Allow your most senior staff to choose their vacation times first. This is a fairly standard practice at many companies so new hires won’t be surprised by this and it keeps your long term staff happy.
Stagger Shifts and Break Times
When things are really busy, it helps to stagger shift start and end times as well as break times so you aren’t missing too many employees at the same time. This way employees will have extra backup when needed.
Offer Extra Time Off During the Year in Lieu of Time Off During the Holidays
One way to try and deter staff from taking their vacation during holiday season is to offer extra time off during the remainder of the year if your employees agree to take their vacation during a time of the year that is less busy, instead of during the holidays.
Communication is key when it comes to creating a schedule that you and your employees are happy with. To create the most effective employee schedule, communicate with your staff and find out the shift times they like to work, and offer incentives like extra premiums for working on holidays and extra time off during times that aren’t as busy.
If you need assistance creating your holiday shift schedule, KOVA Corp can help. We provide enterprise workforce management solutions to help organizations boost employee performance and customer service in their call centers. KOVA’s Verint Media Recorder Workforce Management solution provides accurate forecasting to help contact center supervisors prepare optimal staff schedules. Contact us today to learn more about our enterprise workforce management solutions.
The back office is just as integral to your business as your customer service agents - and yet, this area of contact center business doesn’t receive nearly as much investment
While the back office has undergone a lot of changes in recent years, many back offices still handle many tasks manually, and they may use a lot of paper. Using workforce management software to improve processes and automate tasks are great ways to update your back office.
Here are five reasons not to overlook your back office.
1) Efficiency
A more efficient back office means a more efficient business as a whole. The back office can be made more efficient by going paperless or updating the way paper records are stored. When paper records are stored electronically, they’re faster to find and can be accessed at the click of a mouse.
And once documents are scanned and properly stored electronically, they can be shredded - which frees up space, too.
2) Productivity
New computers are a great way to increase productivity, ensuring your back office staff have the necessary and most up-to-date software to do their jobs properly.
Software is continually being updated, and it works best with the most current operating system. The most current operating system works the best when it’s coupled with the latest hardware. It can really eat into your back office staff’s productivity if they have to wait for a slow and outdated machine every time they wanted to do something. That’s just frustrating for everyone involved.
3) Quality Control
Establishing systems in the back office will help managers optimize tasks so they are done in the most efficient way possible with minimal mistakes. Systems also ensure quality control by providing documentation as to how a task is to be completed, ensuring each employee knows and follows the required steps.
4) Predictability
Predictive analytics can boost your contact center’s success in three main ways: better customer retention, improved follow up contact, and increased quality and efficiency. Back office efficiency programs like Workforce Optimization and Management Software can help lower contact center and back office costs by reducing overstaffing, overtime, and shrinkage. By tracking back office data, managers are able to understand how employee resources are used and can better predict needs for future projects.
5) Preparedness
Disaster recovery is a key process that takes place in the back office. Whether your back office is completely paperless or only partially, so much work takes place digitally that you need to make sure you have a plan in case your data is lost. This goes far beyond ensuring you make daily backups. You need to have plans in place for preventing IT disasters as well as a plan for recovering from one if it does happen.
How the back office operates is reflected in other areas of your call center. That’s why it’s important to optimize the back office for efficiency, productivity, quality control, predictability, and preparedness. For help in setting up your back office to perform optimally, contact KOVA Corp today.
Tim Whiting of Opinionlab recently wrote a great article about tapping into the Voice of the Customer (VoC) when delivering an optimal website redesign.
While the article is specific to website redesign, it applies to any area of your business where you’ll have customer contact. Customer relationships are the key to any successful business, but they’re the lifeblood of a call center. Because of this, it makes sense to listen to the VoC as much as possible.
With a dozen or so major website redesigns under his belt, Tim knows that the VoC comes from many sources. As he writes, customer feedback can be direct, indirect, or inferred. Direct feedback is the most obvious and it can be obtained from a number of sources. The most effective direct feedback is that which is initiated by your customers.
When visitors to your site comment on site errors, you’re able to fix them much faster than you can if people aren’t commenting. It will likely also take you longer to discover the error if your customers aren’t providing feedback on the error. When you hear what issues customers are experiencing, you have the opportunity to replicate them, diagnose them, and fix them.
Indirect feedback about your website comes from non-website sources such as social media. When customers aren’t completely satisfied with something they will talk about it, especially on social media. Inferred feedback comes from observing the behavior of visitors on your site.
Below are three ways you can tap into the VoC at your contact center.
Surveys
If you’re not sure how your customers feel about a particular aspect of your website or processes, just ask them.
You can use Customer Experience Survey Software to create surveys that begin after an interaction with a call center agent, asking your customers how the agent performed. You can also email surveys to customers after their session has ended. Surveys are an important part of your call center customer feedback process.
Social Media
Make sure you have a process for monitoring social media for comments about your service.
Listen to the VoC by engaging with customers on social media. Pay attention to what people are posting about other companies in your industry as well, especially if you see any negative images or posts.
If you see anything negative about your business, make sure you rectify the situation right away and reach out and talk to the customer, apologizing for their bad experience.
Call Recordings
Take advantage of call center recordings and use them to find ways to improve the customer experience.
Verint Media Recorder software monitors calls so supervisors can assess agent performance and identify strengths and weaknesses. Once the supervisor has done so, he or she can schedule one-on-one coaching time with the agent to work on improving their skills.
You can even take it one step further and allow your agents to log in and view results of feedback provided by the customers they spoke to.
Want to learn more about learning from the Voice of the Customer? Read our post “Best Practices When Hiring for a VoC Team.”
With the advent of big data and the internet of things, new realms of possibility have opened for truly “smart” cities - cities with digitally interconnected and technologically managed infrastructures, operations, and citizen interface.
The most-used definition of big data goes something like this: huge data sets that can be analyzed in order to show patterns and trends.
Gil Press, Forbes technology contributor, proposes two additional definitions that are instructive in the context of smart cities:
This revolution in analysis, along with the technological advances of the Internet of Things (IoT) has greatly increased a city’s ability to digitally measure and manage what matters most. That could be infrastructure integration, asset, fleet, and workforce management, public safety, crowd control, meter monitoring, parking enforcement, resource optimization, and so on.
Cities support these kinds of mission objectives through a variety of data sources. As cited in a report by Deloitte, these sources include “video from CCTV cameras, voice, social media, streaming data, sensor logs, supervisory control systems and data acquisition.”
As of 2017, examples of smart solutions in cities include:
Los Angeles: By swapping out 4,500 miles of streetlights with smart LEDs that feed into big data systems and inform the the city of each bulb’s status (working properly, malfunctioning, or dead), technicians can respond almost immediately to repair or replace the bulb. Should a city wish to implement it, the technology currently exists to install smart bulbs capable of changing colors or blinking to announce changing road conditions or to warn drivers of lane closures, accidents, or other hazards.
Shanghai: The spiral architecture of the new Natural History Museum was inspired by a seashell - however, it was the big-data derived insight into crowd control that allowed the museum’s shape to be capitalized on accordingly in managing the flow of thousands upon thousands of visitors.
Saudi Arabia: The Saudi Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs has announced the undertaking of a $500 billion smart city project that is intended to spur urban development, increase citizen satisfaction, and allow the Kingdom to better compete in terms of urban sustainability.
Though Los Angeles, Shanghai and Saudi Arabia represent some of the leading edge developments in smart city initiatives, the reality is that most city’s operations are still uncoordinated and data capture is still conducted through labor-intensive manual processes.
The upside to this is that smart cities aren’t a matter of if, but rather of when. There is only one way for modern cities to go, and that is toward smart technology adoption and implementation.
This means that the market is not only wide open but growing exponentially to represent massive, still largely untapped growth potential. Experts have released statistics indicating that the internet of things - the smart-enabled objects integral to smart cities - will expand to approximately 30 billion objects by 2020.
At KOVA, we and are products are on the front lines of the smart city revolution. To see how our products and expertise are helping cities integrate and scale for a smarter future, read “High-Tech Public Safety Centers Aren’t Just for Big Cities Anymore.”
Holiday season is upon us and this means an increase in sales and customer contact. While many departments of your business will feel the stress of the holiday season, contact center agents are the first line of contact with your customers, so it’s important that they maintain the highest customer service standards - no matter how busy they may be.
Here are a few ways you can support your contact center agents during this busy holiday season.
Use Predictive Analytics to Prepare
Predictive analytics take data gathered from previous busy seasons and turn it into usable statistics to improve performance going forward.
Using predictive analytics can boost the success of your contact center, and it can be especially effective during busy season. This is because it allows you to schedule agents more accurately, plan for times of high and low call volume, and determine which customers warrant a callback.
This can increase customer retention, improve the quality and efficiency with which calls are handled, and help your agents be prepared for the volume of calls coming in.
The Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization suite helps run your contact center more efficiently year round, but especially at the times you need it most like the busy holiday season.
Hire More Staff
Use the data provided by predictive analytics to trigger the hiring of more staff during peak times. There are a number of ways you can handle seasonal staffing at your contact center. You can staff share with other businesses, enlist the help of a temp agency, or outsource.
Re-emphasize a Focus on Customer Service
Urge your contact center agents to focus even more on customer service during the holidays, and give them the tools to help them do it. Ensuring your knowledge base is up to date, that your social media and email channels are active, and generally taking a proactive approach to customer service are all important elements of this.
Offer More Time Off During Less Busy Times
If hiring more seasonal staff isn’t an option for your contact center, you can offer your contact center agents more vacation days or paid time off once the holidays are over.
Reap the biggest rewards of your busy holiday season by fully supporting your contact center agents in their daily tasks. Whether it’s through improved scheduling, additional time off at a later date in lieu of time off during busy season, additional staff to help, or an overall improved focus on customer service, your contact agents are sure to thank you for the additional support. To learn more about how Kova Corp’s Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization suite can help, contact us today.
The holidays bring with them some of the busiest retail shopping days all over the world. A missed call or bad customer interaction with an employee in your call center could mean a missed sale or a bad review which could lead to even more missed sales. Contact center software solutions can help make sure your call center runs as smoothly as possible over the holidays.
There are a number of ways contact center software solutions can ensure a smooth holiday season in your organization. Contact center software solutions can help you leverage historical data, prepare to add seasonal staff, boost employee morale, and create queues that match customer needs. The end result is happy employees and an enjoyable customer service experience sure to have your customers coming back for more.
Data discovery is one of the hottest trends in business intelligence for contact centers. The trend involves easily accessing data for the purposes of collecting and analyzing it. Historical data is useful in making predictions for current or future trends in your call center activity. Once you know past trends in customer and contact center agent activity, you can predict future busy times and prepare your contact center employees.
By studying historical data, you can determine the best time to hire seasonal staff. You’ll want to do this before things get too crazy so you can spend adequate time training them. Spending the appropriate time training new staff helps boost employee morale. New employees will feel confident they can handle the job and existing employees will feel confident they have adequate help during a very busy time.
Making sure your call queues are set up properly, both for employees and customers, is extremely important. You can use your contact center software solution to determine the types of calls you get and when. The more basic calls should be routed to more inexperienced staff while the more challenging calls would be more appropriately handled by your experienced contact center agents. It’s also important to set up the call queues to minimize wait time for customers. Contact center software can help monitor wait times and set up a customer call back feature so customers aren’t waiting longer than necessary on the phone.
In order to successfully roll out your new call center software, be sure to carefully plan when to start using the new software, identify where changes in your current systems will need to be made, define new workflows, process, and changes in responsibility; and invest in training to make sure your employees know how to use the new software to maximize its efficiencies. Communication with your employees is also key so they know what’s happening when.
KOVA Corp’s Workforce Optimization with Verint Media Recorder helps your organization get a complete view of your organization through the capture and processing of critical organizational data so you can react quickly to address problems, streamline processes, and provide the ultimate customer service experience. To learn more about how KOVA Corp’s Workforce Optimization software solution can help your enterprise streamline its processes, contact us today.
Employees are the heart of your contact center, yet too often, they’re disengaged and dissatisfied.
When this happens, performance drops - and in turn, so does customer service and your bottom line. One way to help keep employees on task and at the top of their game is to implement workforce optimization and management software.
Workforce optimization and management software helps keep employees feeling valued, even if they work remotely. Motivation increases, because employees are held more accountable.
By implementing the right solution for your contact center, not only will your employees be more engaged, but your business will also rise above the competition. Here’s how the right workforce management software can increase employee engagement and increase your contact center’s success.
Better Time Management
There’s a fine balance to managing workloads. When there’s no system in place for time management, there’s a tendency for employees to abuse break times by taking longer or more frequent breaks. On the flip side, some employees may take on too much work and struggle to complete their tasks in the designated time. A time tracking and workload management tool can help you and your employees be more efficient and happier in their roles. Employees will no longer lack work and get bored, or have too much to do and burn out.
More Fun
Over half the U.S. population regularly plays some form of online game. Increase employee engagement by using a gamified rewards program that’s tied to your time management and productivity software.
The inclusion of leaderboards, graphic trophies, or ranking statuses in your workforce management software will keep your employees checking in to your website to update their productivity.
Rewards are also a great way to show your employees they are valued. When rewards are tangible and considered desirable by your employees, it increases their engagement and loyalty as they strive to earn that vacation they’ve always wanted, or extra time off to spend with their favorite people.
Positive Recognition
A key factor in employee motivation is praise. Employees who receive praise and encouragement on a regular basis are more likely to be engaged in their work. It can be especially important to keep employee morale high during busy times. When work is extra busy, there is a greater chance that employees will be stressed and not functioning at top capacity.
Employee recognition programs are an important part of workforce management software. It’s crucial that employee recognition is compatible with what your employees value - otherwise it won’t work.
Want to know if your employees value your recognition program? Ask them! Use a survey to find out what kind of recognition they prefer.
Workforce management software increases employee engagement by tracking time and productivity to manage workloads, creating a fun work environment, and recognizing hard work through positive reinforcement.To find out if this solution is right for your contact center, contact us today.
