Workforce Management: Shift Trader

Humanise the workplace series – Workforce Management (WFM) shift Trader – Part 3

Agents will always be the most vital resource for your contact centre. As a contact centre manager it’s your job to boost employee satisfaction and retention, lower sickness and absenteeism rates and enhance customer service. The end result being improved profitability, a happier workforce and happier customers. To achieve this, contact centre managers invest in call centre software such as Workforce Management.

Finding the right Workforce Management (WFM) solution can help you achieve these goals.

WFM Shift Trader

Boosting employee satisfaction can be done in a number of different ways. In order to recruit and retain the best, contact centre managers need to provide options and flexibility for employees to feel wanted and effectively manage their work-life balance. This can be achieved through efficient resource planning and workforce planning.

The contact centre mantra is simple – a happy and appreciated employee = enhanced customer service and profitability.

One of the ways to boost employee engagement and satisfaction is with Calabrio Teleopti’s WFM shift trader module.

In a nutshell, Calabrio Teleopti WFM Shift Trader (part of the lifestyle module designed to boost employee’s work-life balance) is a fully automated module, allowing agents to view their colleagues’ schedules to trade shifts for one or more days.

How exactly does Calabrio Teleopti WFM Shift Trader work?

The request is sent to the agent’s colleague for approval or denial with subsequent, instant notification and schedule updates. Business rules set up previously by the workforce planning team ensure agents can swap as few or as many shifts as they please – without affecting service levels and boosting workforce planning processes.

With the shift trade board within Calabrio Teleopti WFM, agents can post their shifts available for trade and set the criteria for what they want in return e.g. time range. An agent who meets this criteria will see this available shift and can complete the trade by selecting it from the shift trade board.

With all shift trades, whether agent to agent or via the shift trade board, the schedules are updated in real time in the agent portal, team leader portal and planning team view. Agents are also able to see the history of their requested shift swaps.

N.B Don’t forget – shift trader can also work on a semi-automated process, whereby the trades agreed which do not break business rules and are accepted by the system or shift trading can still be sent to team leaders/planners for their final approval if this is your preference.

Benefits of Calabrio Teleopti WFM Shift Trader:

• Considerable reduction in administration – automated request handling
• Employee Empowerment – instant shift trading notifications with an element of flexibility
• No impact on service levels or agent working hours – follows configurable business rules based on skills and available shift trades, boosting resource planning within the contact centre

Interested in finding out more? Speak to our team today!

About Calabrio Teleopti & Business Systems

As top global providers of Workforce Management, Business Systems (UK) Ltd and Calabrio Teleopti work together to provide across the board services in Workforce Management for operational consultancy, technical implementations and training, culminating in improved customer satisfaction, employee engagement and maximised ROI.