Schedule options - Business Rules

[Analyst]

Good day,

I am a business analyst responsible for scheduling in our 24 X 7 Call Centre. I am reviewing our business rules pertaining to scheduling. I am attempting to find the balance between ensuring that our staff meets our volume, and provinding our agents with a satisfactory quality of life. I would be interested in your comments with regards to how your scheduling business rules are set up within your 7 X 24 centre (ie. rotating schedules, shift bids, etc) and the details surrounding how you manage this.

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

[tteamer]

Hi Bob,

Depending on your situation, various business rules can apply. For example, if your call centre has added a new product, that could require you to need a "fresh start" with your shift bid process, by generating all new schedules and assigning schedules either by hire date, performance criteria or a combination of both. If there is no need to drastically change your schedules, but you want to better align your schedules with your workload, you may want to apply a theory we call "grandfather" which allows some agents to maintain their current schedules and change schedule only if they choose to and requires that a certain group to change their schedules. This is usually a "compromise" that supports all of your constituents (the business, the customer and the employee).

Feel free to contact me for more information.

[Dsqr]

Things to consider also would be temporary split shifts when volumes and forcasts change suddenly. Offer a 10% shift differential for this and it works. Have you looked into part time models as well. Work with the management staff to offer Over Time contests during peak periods of volume. The only thing though to insure efficiancy for longer periods of volume or lag is a shift bid. They may be the bain of all but they can be fairly administerd as well as maintain the efficiancy and profitability of our resource, People.

Hope this helps.

[Matt Schmitz]

Hitting a good balance between having agents on the phones when needed and having solid "quality of life" like having fixed schedules is always a tough act.

A method that helped me overcome some major "day of week" volume changes was to run a certain percentage of agents part time to add agents to heavy days and thin the agents out on the slack days. There are some general rules you can apply to find out how many part timers you need. The easiest is to run an agent forecast (Erlang-C or some such) for the heaviest day and another for the lightest day. Take the difference between these two on an FTE basis and use that number to decide your part time headcount. The total FTE count for the team doesn't change.

I found that by looking for and hiring part timers who needed those particular hours/shifts, and adding benefits, really smoothed out the service level / scheduling problems. For me, the key was adding benefits in order to keep attrition down among the part time crew.