
Revisiting Your Service Level Objectives

In recent years, I have seen a trend to streamline and simplify agent performance standards. In many cases, they had become too complex — weighted averages, percent time in this and that mode, formulas that would take a mathematician to figure out. Yes, if I’m one of your agents, give me some objectives on being in the right place at the …
Accurate workload forecasting is critical to contact center success. Recruiting, hiring, staffing and scheduling—virtually everything that goes into optimizing resources depends on having a good estimate of the work that will come your way. Recently, I was reminded of an article I wrote that was published on icmi.com “10 Causes of Inaccurate Forecasts (and How to Avoid Them)”. If it’s …
The very forces that are making scheduling difficult — more complex products and services, additional contact channels, faster pace of change, and the need for diverse agent skills — are creating an environment in which accurate scheduling is absolutely essential. Fortunately, scheduling is a process that can be learned and continuously improved. You get better at it with practice! We’ve …