Mastering call center scheduling: The playbook for higher efficiency

Contact center managers are busy—they don't always have the time to track which agent is doing what and when. Because of this, scheduling is an integral part of any contact center.

Done well, call center scheduling empowers agents and team leaders to plan their shift patterns in advance and know when they need to work and what they need to do while on their shift.

In this blog post, we’ll walk through some call center scheduling best practices for both team leaders and agents, and scheduling tips from what we’ve seen in our own contact centers.

What is call center scheduling?

Call center scheduling is the process of planning and managing agents and their tasks in a way that helps them—and the business—operate as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Usually, contact center scheduling requires managers to go through daily rosters, set weekly schedules, track call volumes, forecast, and track agents’ availability.

How does call center employee scheduling work?

Implementing WFM scheduling requires meticulous planning, coordination, and the right tools and technologies. Here are a few key elements in the process:

1. Forecasting

This involves gathering historical information on call volume, demand trends, and workforce performance measures. Analyze the data to determine peak times, seasonal fluctuations, and staffing needs.

For example, after examining call statistics from the previous six months, you can identify days with the busiest call times.

2. Staffing requirements

Now, look at how many agents you’ll need and which skills should be covered. (For example, if you need agents who speak a specific language to cover different time zones or territories.)

3. Shift creation

Establish rules for break times, shift lengths, and compliance with labor regulations. Create scheduling criteria based on the workforce’s preferences, abilities, and availability. For example, a beauty store sets a minimum shift time of four hours and gives employees a break of 20 minutes after three hours.

4. Agent assignments

The next step is examining your workforce and predicting demand. This means assigning staff to specific shifts while considering availability, skills, preferences, and labor laws.

5. Real-time monitoring

Evaluate your schedules regularly and make necessary adjustments. Look at your key performance metrics—service levels, agent utilisation rate, and resolution time—to assess how well your schedules work. Then, identify gaps and inefficiencies so you can quickly modify schedules to improve performance.

Importance of contact center scheduling

Call center scheduling is important to ensure ease in workflow and operations and empower agents to hit their targets and achieve their priorities within the available time.

9 best practices, strategies, and tips to optimize call center scheduling

Now, let’s look at 9 best practices to consider when you’re scheduling shifts.

1. Empower your agents to choose shifts based on their availability

When planning your call center shift schedules, allow your agents to choose shifts that suit their lifestyle. This practice isn’t only conducive to the productivity of a call center, but it also increases morale, improves work-life balance, and leads to happier agents.

As a side benefit, including agents in the shift planning and workforce scheduling processes also improves collaboration and can reduce back-and-forth.

2. Publish shifts well in advance

Notify your agents of their shifts well before they’re scheduled to work. Often, agents get one week or less notice for their shifts, which is not a lot.

This can sometimes fly under the radar, but allowing agents to have visibility over when they are working can have a much more lasting impact that benefits your contact center over the long term (in the form of lower attrition and hiring costs)—and is especially true when planning call center night shift schedules.

If your contact center can forecast demand and publish shift plans in advance (ideally, around eight weeks before the shifts happen), it gives you the opportunity to positively impact your agents’ well-being, productivity, job satisfaction, and overall customer experience.

3. Embrace remote working

There’s been a clear shift towards remote work in the past few years. Most companies had to transform their workforce from in-office to remote in weeks or even days. So, we can conclude that remote working is here to stay. In fact, a study by Gartner found that 70% of customer support agents want to continue working from home at least once a week.

Global companies often operate 24/7, meaning they have to support customers in different time zones. As a result, they need geographically distributed teams to ensure customer support at all times.

Ultimately, adopting a remote working model gives your contact center more flexibility when organizing agents to cover customer support requests—regardless of their location or time zone.

4. Make team visibility a priority

Contact center scheduling, in an ideal world, is simple. Listen to your agents, plan a fair schedule around their individual shift patterns, consider time offs and breaks, and off you go. Easy.

But in reality, it’s not that simple. Teams should be able to see who’s working on the same shift and their activities (phone, live chat, email, admin tasks) throughout the day. Why? This allows teams to respond to sudden changes in demand and to adapt accordingly.

Giving the support team visibility of your call center schedule template enables them to track fellow agents' and managers' activities and shifts, pivot quickly, and operate more effectively.

5. Document agents’ skills and the nature of conversations managed

This is one of the most underrated call center scheduling best practices. As a manager, you have to have a good grasp of the diverse skill sets of your agents— how each one operates, their unique skills, and their areas of interest and preferences. This will help you allocate tasks more efficiently (and make task completion easier and more seamless).

6. Offer agents variety at work

As they say, variety is the spice of life, and it also applies to call center operations. Give your agents flexibility—it might be the option to cover the phones instead of live chat one day or maybe let them work fewer days a week while maintaining the same allocated hours.

7. Implement contact center scheduling software

The final call center scheduling best practice is leveraging a call center scheduling software that best fits your business needs.

Many contact centers still use spreadsheets to schedule their agents. But that becomes challenging once you have different shift patterns, multiple daily activities, shift swapping, shift rotations, and changing demand levels throughout the day.

That’s when you need call center workforce management platforms to streamline and automate tasks and save time for your workforce schedulers.

Choose a scheduling software that empowers agents with flexibility and autonomy. This is the most human-centric and strategically sensible way forward. Dialpad WFM, for example, comes with all the contact center scheduling software features you need to simplify your managers’ scheduling process:

8. Plan for breaks and rotations

Make sure to schedule breaks and rotations to ensure agent productivity and reduce the risk of burnout. Avoid scheduling continuous work for extended periods or giving repeated duties to employees to ensure their well-being.

Dialpad WFM’s rotating shifts feature allows you to plan for adequate rest for all agents.

9. Err on the side of over-communicating

Good communication ensures that all your agents know their shift start and end times and the tasks they should prioritize.

Some staff scheduling tools, like Dialpad WFM, have built-in communication features that let supervisors provide instant updates to their teams about shift changes.

Challenges of call center scheduling

When it comes to scheduling your workforce, keeping everyone happy and assigning shifts fairly is just one part of the equation. There are other common challenges, too:

Forecasting accurately

Call center forecasting has always been a key challenge, especially when you’re doing it manually with spreadsheets and formulas, but it’s much easier to do today thanks to scheduling tools.

Depending on your tech stack, you should be able to integrate your call center scheduling software with your ticketing, CRM, and other software to pull historical data that informs future patterns. The system can then convert these expected ticket volumes to the number of people needed using a range of statistical models.

Staying compliant with regulations

Depending on globality, you should keep different regulations in mind when scheduling your team. WFM scheduling enforces standards within the system, helping you adhere to legal requirements and labor laws. Save yourself the headache of juggling these requirements and avoid any legal and financial fines that may result from compliance violations.

Reacting quickly to changes as they happen

It always helps to plan in advance, but things change quickly in a contact center environment. Either you have more or fewer customer inquiries coming through, or your capacity changes through illness, holidays, or shrinkage from other priorities.

Essential technology and automation in call center scheduling:

Features to look for You have many options for software, and the specific features your business needs will be unique to you. But regardless, here are some core features to be aware of, even if you may not need them now:

1. Forecasting

A good call center scheduling tool should include forecasting features that consider historical data and patterns to help you determine future staffing requirements.

Dialpad WFM’s integrated forecasting, for example, seamlessly connects your ticketing platforms and uses your historical ticket data to predict demand and staffing needs months ahead of time. This not only helps your contact center get the most out of your budget but also makes it easier to prepare for peaks and troughs in demand:

2. Shift planning

Next, your platform should have a robust and easy-to-use shift planning feature that lets your workforce schedulers build and manage staff schedules quickly. Look for automated scheduling based on demand projections, shift switching, and planning:

And if you struggle with no-shows, a shift-swapping can also help reduce the chances of them happening.

3. Communication

Communication is vital throughout the scheduling process—agents should always be aware of who’s on shift when scheduled leaves are, priority tasks, and so on.

Some solutions, like Dialpad, have integrated communication features so schedulers can quickly notify team members of schedule or shift changes, and agents can communicate with each other if they want to swap shifts—resulting in lower absenteeism and higher employee satisfaction.

4. Integrations with the rest of your tech stack

For contact center teams that use many other tools, having a call center scheduling solution with native integrations with your payroll and HR systems can simplify processes, improve onboarding, and increase overall efficiency.

Dialpad WFM integrates with CRMs (like Salesforce and Kustomer), calendaring apps (like Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook), and HRIS (like BambooHR, HiBob, and CharlieHR) to expedite your scheduling procedures and keep everyone informed about shifts at all times.

5. Advanced reports and analytics

Finally, data is essential to scheduling effectively, and having dashboards and real-time insights empowers your managers to quickly understand labor costs, efficiency, and employee performance at a glance.

For example, let’s suppose your service levels have been declining steadily. This is a sign that your scheduling procedure might need to be adjusted to ensure you have enough agents to answer incoming calls and live chats. If agent compliance is low, your scheduling may need to be more flexible to align with your team’s needs.

What is the future of call center scheduling?

Even compared to a few years ago, the call center scheduling process has evolved significantly thanks to the rise of AI. In the next few years, two more major factors will likely play a role in how contact centers approach scheduling:

1. Impact of predictive analytics

One of AI’s strengths is its ability to ingest large volumes of data and use it to generate forecasts. From a scheduling perspective, this has the potential to improve efficiency and bottom lines for contact centers considerably.

For example, McKinsey’s analysis found that one company “improved forecast accuracy by seven percentage points while halving the work required to manage team capacities and schedules. The change improved customer service levels by more than 10 percent while cutting staffing and overtime costs by more than 5 percent.”

2. Growth of remote and flexible work

Most contact center agents—81%—prefer working from home. This growing popularity of remote and hybrid work will also continue to impact call center scheduling, with businesses that are open to flexible work potentially attracting more employees who prefer alternative work arrangements.

This can also impact other business areas, such as staff hiring, onboarding, and reskilling, as it tends to be more challenging to ramp up new hires remotely, which means a more significant time and resource investment. For workforce schedulers who are managing shifts for new hires, this will likely need to be factored into the process.

Enhance call center scheduling and always be prepared for your staffing needs with Dialpad

Whether you’re looking to switch to an integrated scheduling solution or don’t want to rely on manual scheduling with spreadsheets, many options can make life easier for your workforce schedulers.

If you’re interested in a contact center platform that comes with a robust WFM and scheduling solution built right in, check out Dialpad WFM and see how businesses across every industry—from healthcare to finance—are leveraging its easy-to-use features.

¹ringcentral.com/office/plansandpricing_f.html
²deputy.com/pricing
³talkdesk.com/pricing/
⁴zoho.com/shifts/pricing.html
⁵njixo.com/pricing