Team Leader Shift Selection

[northernboy6]

Hi everyone,

I was hoping to get some suggestions. I am one of 20 Team Leader in a credit card call center and we will be completing a shift roll-out for your reps in a couple of months. We do this by senority. My question is, other than senority how can the team Leader pick their shifts? In the past we have pick by senority, but this causes low morale from the less tenured TLs. I would really be thankful for any suggestions.

[Matt Schmitz]

Whenever we roll a full blown shift bid we follow these rules:

Agents with special "proven" needs get first dibs. These needs are usually transportation and/or medical limits. (The bus doesn't run that early in the agents part of town. The agent has a repeating doctors appt that keeps him/her off a particular shift. That sort of thing.)

Agents that car pool with other agents get second dibs.

Agents with day care and/or family issues go next.

Everyone else goes by seniority. If all of the agents are new, we go with class/test/quality scores.

This has worked for us time and again and usually answers any complaints about not having special needs met and avoiding favoritism.

Best of luck. Shift bids can get messy!

[SNHORNE81]

Matt I like what you have stated you do concerning shift bids. A question ... How many agents are in your call center?

[smack]

A couple of other things(questions) to think about when bidding....

-Do your reps understand the true business reason for the bids?
-What shifts do you need your best people on?
-What's more important in your facility, quality, quantity, or morale?
-What's the expected attrition from this move?
-Do you have a history to base the potential attrition off of?


Having done shift bids twice with two different companies, the one determining factor that helped us in deciding who goes where was basing the prioritization off of performance with an emphasis on quality.

While generally viewed as a negative , a bid can have a positive impact on the results of your business if approached right. We threw out the seniority clause and went based off of performance. Talk about a spirited competition that not only improved the reps performance but that of the center as well.

[Matt Schmitz]

SNHORNE81: You asked how many agents are in our center? We have close to 1,800 at this site, broken up into multiple contracts with multiple teams on each contract. Most teams are around 60 agents. Some teams are as few as 8 while others can be as large as 200+. Since we are an outsourcer, the contracts are quite varied. We have sites all over the world...

Not all of the teams here use my methods for selecting shift bids. However, the process I stated works for my teams (6 teams at 300 agents total.) I have noticed that this method works well for my teams, based on very low attrition rates and general high morale on these teams.

Hope this answers some of your questions.

Matt