Flexible Scheduling

[slarsen]

I recently acquired a new project for work at home agents. Ops management would like the agents will be scheduled for 15 hours per week by workforce planning and then able to pick up 10 additional hours per week themselves through the scheduling tool. Problem: The call center uses Blue Pumpkin software. We are considering adding dummy agents to the software and then allowing the WAHA agents to take trades/partial trades from the dummy agents. Does anyone know how an administrator in BP can post trades for the agents to select? I do not want to have to login as each dummy agent and trade all of their shifts away every week as the program is expected to ramp up to 1500 agents.

Does anyone know which scheduling program allows workforce management to post the requirements and the agents to choose their schedules? I know Working Solutions uses something like this and possibly West with their WAHAs.

[gkern]

I have spent some time in the outsourcing world and understand the home agent model reasonably well and have a suggestion that may work for you (I have no skin in the game on this, I just think it is a reasonable solution):

Given you have 1500 agents already and essentially need your WFM tools augmented to accommodate a work at home model, why not outsource 50-100 agents worth of calls to someone who specializes in a work at home model and have them either do the development of the tool for you or take over your WFM function for you? You could certainly write into the contract that you have ongoing writes to the tool and any customization that was done. Given your size you could transition 50 agents in about a month by not backfilling for attrition.

Also, unless you have virutal training tools and curriculum in place already, you are going to need some help in this area as well with implementing a work at home model. You could get these as well with a small outsourcing arrangement.

I suspect that you can accomplish this with no incremental cost to your operation. In fact I think that it is likely that your overall costs would go down slightly and you will get WFM and Training tools to go along with it.

Let me know if I can help you with this.

Greg Kern
Consultant
512-934-0254
gkern@austin.rr.com