A Quick Guide Covering the Major Steps in Deploying and Operating a Contact Center

A Quick Guide Covering the Major Steps in Deploying and Operating a Contact Center

1 . January . 2020

The Contact center planning and management process includes the nine critical steps that your center should be following in order to be properly staffed, scheduled, forecasted and prepared for just about anything.

These nine steps encapsulate the basics for making sure that your center’s service level objectives are suited to your organization’s needs – and that your right resources are in place to make this happen.

Define Objectives

The service level and response time objectives must be defined for the major types of interactions: those that must be handled right away (requiring a service level objective), and those that can be handled at later time (requiring a response time objective).

Gather Data

The contact center systems are important source of planning data. But much of the information you need comes from other sources- e.g. what marketing is doing, how customer trends and preferences are changing, and activities by the competition that may have an impact on your workload, and relevant developments in the market.

Forecasting Workload

The most important factors while forecasting your workload include customer contacts, average talk time, average after-call work, and volume. Additionally, you should consider all types of traffic from voice and multi-media contacts. Your plans should account for any related work that will require contact center resources.

Shrinkage

Without considering shrinkage factor, your contact center objective will not be as per expectations. You’ve got be realistic and account for breaks, absenteeism, training, work not directly part of handling customer interactions, and all the other considerations that occupy agent time.

Scheduling & Cost

Schedules are the essentially forecast of who needs to be where and when. They should lead to getting the right people in the right places at the right times.

This step projects for the resources required to meet service and quality objectives.

Repeat For Higher and Lower Levels of Service

Preparing budgets around different levels of service provides an understanding of cost trade-offs, which is invaluable in budgeting decisions.

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