Desk Sharing...Help!!!

[Samirr Burton]

I am in the process of re-aligning my staff and hiring additional staff. I am currently attempting to place my staff into seats manually but seems to keep running out of seats. Prior to us realigning, I have people lining my walls waiting for a seat. I have forecasted for these people to be on the phones, but since they are standing around waiting for an available seat, I am taking a beating with my service levels.

My boss, seems to think that we have enough seats and refusing to build additional space. He is putting it on my head to find away to seat everyone now! I tried giving people mulitiple seats daily but find myself seating them far from their supervisors with little to no coverage and this is also time consuming...does anyone have a solution...I am at my wits end. PLEASE HELP ME!

[mdbabb]

We have had a similar situation with our seating arrangements, and found that the following application helped resolve many of these issues.

1) We utilize open seating - first come, first serve. We are a 24x7 shop, so seating next to supervisors is not so critical. We also utilize a call recording system for quality management and have a supervisor skill for assistance to these agents.
2) We staff using our Work Force Management system to max out the number of seats available. This allows us to maximize the use of our existing seats without overlapping.

[Samirr Burton]

MDBabb,

Thanks for your input. Unfortunately, we moved from this concept a couple of years ago. It seems that we lost a lot of the control and our agents didn't feel comfortable searching for a desk especially with the amount of overtime we offer. We also have an initiative to seat all agents in closed proximity due performance demands, real time coaching and also our contigency plans along with our call center being a Union shop we have demands to ensure our agents are seated in close proximity to get strong performance evaluation.

I too am a 24X7 shop and have only began to experience this issue in the past year. As for the WFM system helping me maximize our seats, Iam using TCS/Aspect and it helps by recoginzing my positions but it is not assisting me in the manner I need. I was told that there was a recent inquiry on this site that had a solution but can't find it. Thnks a bunch...

[Earl]

Hello Samirr,

I had this same problem and found some software called Call Center Floor Manager (CFM) that has been great for me. This software takes away all of the manual work and it also optimizes your supervisor schedules to give you best coverage which is definitely good in Call Centers where there is a union.


This software will let you create your floor plan in the software.

It will then let you import your schedules from your work force managment tool into the software, It will give you an analysis of how many seats you will need to seat everyone permanently. This analysis will let you know if you can seat everyone or if you need to hot seat which means that a portion of your staff may not have the same desk everyday but may have a portion of you staff seated in more than one desk by day of week which will be the same each week.

Once you have this done, the software will then create supervisor schedules that give the best coverage and create the teams by assigning all agents to the best supervisor schedule based on your sup to agent ratio. Once you have the system assign the team, it will then let you seat all supervisors in the desk that you would like.

Once this is done, the software will then seat everyone near the supervisor automatedly.

Using this process, I complete my seating assignment process in 45 minutes and I have over 800 employees with 425 workstations which gives me a seating ratio of 1.88 which is almost topping out.

Before I got this software, we were talking about building out but once I began using this tool, we found an additional 70 seats were being underutilized. So this software was my saviour. I don't have the sales guys name but the company name is CPM. My buddy who also works in a cable company gave me the website and I requested a demo. This sounds like what you need. I had been looking for something like this for a long time.... I hope it helps you...

The website is WWW.CALLCPM.COM

[Earl]

Samirr,

I found the guy's card for the CFM software. The company name is Call Center Performance Management (CPM). The sales man we used was Thomas Williams and his number is 770-974-1820 He is located in ATlanta. Good luck.....

[Dan Williams]

Hello Samirr,

I work for a large Credit Card operations here in florida and I too am using the call center floor manager. I looked for something like this for a while and found nothing on the market until 6 months ago. I really like it becasue we are pretty much at seating capacity on Mondays in particular and with Mondays being my highest staff and call volume day, I need more desks and would have people standing around also waiting for someone to get off work.

but thanks to Monday being a high call in sick day, the tool lets me take advantage of those desks that are available due to to people calling in absent. Before the tool, I had to run schedules based on how many seats I had, now I can take full advantage of the seating opportunities and it is also a morale booster to my staff to know that their desks is permanent regardless of how many they have. Before the tool, everyone was coming in looking for a place to sit. Now only 15% of my staff have a different desk during the week. I don't know if they still do it, but ask for a seating analysis of your center before you purchase....

[Samirr Burton]

Thanks Daniel and Earl.

Earl, I called that sales person at the number you suggested and left a message. I haven't heard from him yet. Do you have another number to reach him?

[Nicholas]

I am very intrigued by this software. I have been looking for something like this for a long time. Does this company have a demo they can send to me for review?

[Earl]

Samirr,

I tried sending you a note through the system but it came back undelivered. I read you last thread and I hope you got in touch with Thomas Williams. I have another contact which is ---- Lexmond. His number is 770-321-0972.

Nicholas go to WWW.CallCPM.com and request a demo....Take care

[ch1jske1]

This is a lifesaver!! I have been searching the internet for months. I have tried every keyword combination possible and came up with nothing. This is exactly what I have been looking for!! I posted a question under the technology section then saw your response. Thanks Again!!!

Joe

[Timb]

Earl,

I am currently using the CFM desk sharing tool and it has been incredible. We have purchased two products from Call Center Performance management works in conjuction with our TCS Database.

For years, I thought the only way to do my seating was by hand. We use the call center floor manager tool daily and I can tell you from experience it has saved us time and money. My boss was thrilled that I had found this tool. I recommed this tool to anyone who is having seating problems. I really enjoyed working with the staff at CallCPM. They are very knowledgeable and friendly poeple who understand call centers.

[Samirr Burton]

Hello Earl,

I tried sending you a message but never heard from you. I have talked with the sales people at CPM about their seating software but wanted to ask you some questions about using the software. From my conversations with the sales guy, it appears that this is the way to go. But wanted to ask you some questions, specifically....Please respond. Thanks

[Thomas Williams]

Hello Samirr, Dan, Earl and others,

My name is Thomas Williams and I have recieved a large amount of inquiries relating to our seating software. After asking where they heard about our call center seating software, I was informed of this particalur site. In review of this site it appears to be a great place for call center professionals to share information and insight on call center subject matter.

I see that there a a few people on this site using our software and appear to be delighted with the results. I wanted to take this opportunity to engage others to look at their seating concerns and determine how it is impacting budgets and life in the call center. I have been in the call center industry for many years with emphasis on work force managment and have seen the same trend of creating optimal schedules to meet the call arrival patterns without emphasis on seating issues.

Most of my clients shared the same problem, some of our clients had several agents lining the walls waiting on the next available desk and of course this impacts service levels and when translating that to cost, it becomes quite high in terms of budgeting. With cost being a major focus in call centers today, I encourage all of you to take a look at your current situation. Our software has assisted call centers in identifying what there needs are before a shift bid takes place and ultimately, it autamatically seats everyone in the call center in matter minutes while keeping the supervisor and agent where they belong...near each other.

One of our clients which is a very large financial credit card operation were in the beginning stages of identifying a larger building because of limited space utilization and ask for our assistance and we were able to save them from making that mistake because they had more desk than they needed by going to a more efficient "hot seating" process which made the process quite seamless. Again I encourage others to look at their current situation and forward any quesitons they may have as it relates to this process. In keeping with the rules of this website, I will not place any marketing literature here. I would hate to lose access to such a viable solution for call center professionals to discuss their issues and concerns. As I too will be sharing a lot of my call center expertise with others here.
If you want, you can contact me and I can assist you in providing you with a demo on our website. Good luck all and best regards,


Thomas Williams
770-974-1820