Navigating contact center staffing complexities in a multichannel world

Contact center leaders face a myriad of challenges every day. At the forefront of customer experience, the pressure is on to deliver the right experience on the right channel, every single time. 

Agents must be available to communicate with customers — whether it’s in a multichannel or omnichannel environment — and be highly efficient. While traditional service levels in the contact center are to answer 80% of calls in 20 seconds, research from Call Center Helper magazine suggests many contact centers are attempting to answer 90% of calls in 15 seconds.

This pressure is compounded by the complexity of managing both in-house and outsourced staff, fluctuating call volumes, and figuring out how to best deploy AI to handle low-level inquiries while maintaining service quality. Add to this growing cost pressures and it’s clear that relying on the status quo will not help leaders overcome these challenges. 

It's time to rethink the way workforce planning in contact centers works. 

It’s time to consider alternatives to spreadsheets that will help contact center and operations leaders drive concrete benefits such as reducing costs and wait times, minimizing under- and overstaffing, and improving customer service with skills and capacity rightsizing.

In this blog, we’ll look at contact center strategies that have been effective across financial services, healthcare, and a range of other sectors. 

Managing multichannel communication

Contact centers are expected to meet customers where they are, across multiple communication channels — phone, email, chat, text, social media, and even video conferencing. Whether a customer prefers a phone call to discuss a portfolio shift or a live chat for product inquiries, having skilled staff available to manage these interactions seamlessly and consistently is critical.

Multichannel communication adds complexity to staffing and forecasting because each communication channel has its own unique patterns of demand and customer behavior. Historical trends and data for one channel may not apply to others, making it increasingly challenging to forecast and deliver optimal service levels.

When it comes to delivering high levels of customer service, the stakes are high. According to CX Today, 79% of consumers will stop doing business with a brand after just one bad customer experience. With customer expectations for fast responses, even a brief lag in service on any channel and a single poor experience could prompt customers to seek services elsewhere, resulting in damage to brand reputation and lost revenue for the company.

Outsourcing logistics

This complexity is further exacerbated when outsourcing or BPO vendors are involved. Often, these partners handle more routine inquiries, help during peak times, and deliver 24-hour coverage. 

However, maintaining quality control and seamless communication between in-house and outsourced teams can be difficult. Relying on spreadsheets to juggle the logistics of who is responsible for which channel and when can lead to gaps in coverage and inconsistent service quality. 

Seasonality and unpredictable call volumes

Another major challenge for contact center leaders is dealing with fluctuating spikes in demand. For healthcare, this could be during flu season as we discussed in a previous blog, or for retail or travel it could be around sales periods or holidays.  

For financial services organizations, fluctuations could include the rush of inquiries during tax season, market volatility, or when regulatory changes are announced, all of which cause overwhelming surges in contact center volumes.

These peaks in activity are not only hard to predict, but also difficult to staff for. Coordinating staffing levels and keeping costs in check between in-house and outsourced teams during these periods requires precise forecasting and planning. 

Without an advanced workforce planning solution, many organizations struggle to source and deploy the right number of agents with the right skill sets at the right times. This can result in either overstaffing and extra costs, or understaffing, which can lead to increased overtime costs, longer wait times, and a bad customer experience. 

AI and automation: A double-edged sword

Gartner reports that labor expenses can represent up to 95% of contact center costs and that by 2026, conversational AI deployments within contact centers will reduce these costs by $80 billion. 

 By automating low-level, repetitive inquiries, contact centers can free up human agents to focus on more complex or sensitive queries. However, the challenge lies in balancing automation with the human touch — particularly when customers expect personalized service.

Poorly implemented AI can lead to longer resolution times if customers have to repeat themselves or escalate issues to human agents. Additionally, until AI can handle more complex inquiries, agents still need to be trained and upskilled to manage more complex interactions.

Having the right number of properly skilled staff — who are usually more expensive — combined with either outsourced teams or augmented AI technology is a delicate balancing act beyond the capabilities of spreadsheet-based planning. 

The human factor in workforce planning 

Managing a contact center workforce involves accounting for more than just call volumes and channel preferences. Human factors such as employee leave, absence and sickness, burnout, training, and scheduled time off can significantly affect service levels. A report by Cornell University professors found 87% of workers reported high or very high stress levels at their contact centers, and 77% reported high or very high personal levels of stress.

Burnout can be especially prevalent in high-stakes industries like financial services and healthcare, where agents are dealing with complex and emotionally charged customer inquiries. During peak periods or crises, such as economic downturns or major health events, agents may be overwhelmed, leading to increased absenteeism and turnover. 

Break the spreadsheet status quo

In many contact centers, workforce planning is still managed using tens or even hundreds of spreadsheets — they are, after all, the status quo. However, spreadsheets are not designed to handle these dynamic and unpredictable variables and have significant limitations when it comes to the complex demands of modern contact centers. Spreadsheet planning is slow, prone to human error, and vulnerable to security and version control issues, all of which result in inefficient planning.

One of the biggest drawbacks of spreadsheets is their inability to provide real-time data and actionable insights. It’s time-consuming and laborious to manually process the raw data into insights that can drive decisions and actions. In addition, these manual updates mean staffing decisions are based on outdated information. Furthermore, spreadsheets limit how accurately you forecast future trends based on multiple variables, such as customer demand, agent availability, and channel performance, which is crucial for effective workforce planning.

Transform staff and customer experience

Advanced workforce planning software helps you address these issues by connecting demand planning with workforce planning and forecasting, and incorporating the costs, skills, and capabilities of the workforce. With such solutions, contact center and operations leaders can leverage data-driven insights and automation to optimize staffing and ultimately improve customer experience in several ways:  

1. Real-time data integration:
   Pull data from multiple sources including your workforce management (WFM), HCM/HR, finance, operations, and other systems to make informed decisions on staffing and resource allocation based on current conditions, not outdated projections.
   
   
2. Predictive analytics:
   Leverage historical data to forecast call volumes, seasonal trends, and demand spikes, ensuring adequate staffing even during unpredictable periods. Better understand the impact of events on incoming contact volumes so you can minimize over- and understaffing.
   
   
3. Scenario modeling and "what-if" analysis:
   Model and compare various staffing strategies, such as reallocating agents or increasing the use of outsourced staff or AI, to promptly assess the potential impact on headcount, costs, and productivity KPIs. Model the cases and activities that could be handled by different agents to maximize efficiency and meet or exceed the 80/20 service level rule.
   
   
4. BPO optimization:
   Optimize the workforce with the ideal mix of employees and agency contractors. Compare BPO cost and performance metrics to better understand trade-offs on enhancing customer service and reducing expenses.
   
   
5. Upskilling and development:
   Accurate forecasting allows managers to incorporate time for ongoing training, helping agents handle complex inquiries while enhancing job satisfaction and performance.
    

Be a force for transformation

Contact center leaders face a unique set of challenges that are even more difficult to manage with outdated tools. While spreadsheets are a familiar tool, easy to access and have served a purpose, they are increasingly insufficient for the complex demands of modern contact centers. 

By breaking out of the status quo and advancing to modern workforce planning software, contact center leaders can overcome these challenges, improve staffing allocation, reduce wait times and costs, and ultimately improve the customer experience, helping retain clients and maintain a competitive edge.