As practice shows, it is quite difficult for owners of outsourced customer support services to predict the necessary number of employees to achieve the effectiveness of the call center. In some cases, the call center faces downtime, and the company suffers losses. However, the opposite also happens: the support staff is overloaded and cannot answer urgent customer questions in a timely manner. In our article we will tell you how to predict the optimal load of the call center.
The efficiency of the call center lies in the correct allocation of the financial investment that is reserved for staff. If this task is solved correctly, customers will be able to get advice on time and remain satisfied with the quality of service.
Before choosing the number of staff, it is worth doing a detailed analysis. This will allow you to get rid of an oversupply or shortage of workers, which affects the performance of outsourced customer support services. Therefore, it is important to predict the number of possible phone calls that the contact center will receive on a given day.
A quality staff monitoring system is based on a combination of archived information and new data to make predictions. When the techniques are applied correctly, the accuracy of the prediction increases, allowing you to determine the workload of your support staff.
A typical job schedule predictor for outsourced customer support services employees performs the following tasks:
These operations are cyclical, which increases the accuracy and stability of predictions. However, there is no standard for predicting call center workload – it all depends on the development of the company.
After receiving the information, predictors learn the number of calls from it and divide the resulting numbers by the total of the original prediction for a certain period of time. The result can be positive or negative. In the first case, the staff of outsourced customer support services is too large, and the operators do not have the necessary load. Due to this, the employee will slack off, which leads to a decrease in service quality.
In the second case, the prediction is underestimated. This means that the call center does not have enough staff and employees can’t respond to all customer requests. This also becomes the reason for the deterioration of the quality of customer service, because the line is busy. Operators will get tired, productivity will decrease, and sales will drop as well.
In order to estimate the potential financial losses, it is necessary to calculate how much money one call brings to the company. This value should be multiplied by the number of unprocessed calls per month, and then you get a result that will hardly make you happy. It turns out that the closer the total is to zero, the better is the staff of outsourced customer support services.
There is tremendous competition in the contact center market, so companies need to get the most out of their investment. A shortage or overstaffing of outsourced customer support services causes financial losses. An accurate prediction will help to improve the efficiency of the contact center and increase the company’s profits.
