SWPP: Strategic Shrinkage Management
Discover the true importance of an accurate shrinkage forecast. Here you will learn how to manage shrinkage through a combination of forecasting, simulation, and staffing optimization technologies.
SWPP: The Business World is a-Changing: What the Boss Needs From You
The Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article a few weeks ago, entitled “Strategic Plans Lose Favor: Slump Showed Bosses Value of Flexibility, Quick Responses” (January, 25, 2010, by J. Lublin and D. Mattioli). In it, the authors describe how many CEOs, because of the recent change in the business environment, have given up on trying to stick to a rigid year-long strategic plan.
Contact Professional: Deal or No Deal – The Art of Salesmanship in the Contact Center
Working in a contact center is not always an easy job, and selling is even harder. Hiring the right people is critical, as these sales agents will drive revenue to your organization. Read on for tips and tricks associated with hiring the right sales agents…
SWPP:Lessons from the Last Recession
We have all heard of the adages that those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it and that business cycles are like pendulums. There is a lot of wisdom in an adage and, when listening to today’s business news, we should keep their advice in mind. This applies especially to those of us who are old enough to remember the years between 1980 and 1982, 1990 and 1991, and 2000 and 2003 as we feel our economy slipping toward a recession…
SWPP: The Contact Center Decision Making Cycle
The Strategic Decision-making Cycle has is a powerful new concept called “Enterprise Analytics,” that has been introduced to contact center operations over the last few years. This concept leverages robust mathematical technologies, such as mathematical optimization, simulation modeling, and forecasting techniques against the big picture contact center decisions that we are so often asked to analyze (without the time to do it!)…
SWPP: Our Old Assumptions Don’t Hold: Requirements, Adherence, and Non-Traditional Channels
If there is one obvious contact center trend in the last few years, it is this: the management of the “new” contact center channels and multiple sites/regions is rapidly becoming consolidated. Email, chat, instant messaging, branch offices, back-office and casework processing across multiple centers and regions are being handed over to contact center planners in order to take advantage of the hard earned expertise we have each developed. It is thought that many of the economies we have brought to our call center plans, and some of the mathematical wizardry we possess, can be brought to bear to help our companies again do more with fewer resources…
Contact Center Professional: Optimizing Your Strategic Plan – How to Avoid Call Center Disaster Stories
If the call center industry is rich with nothing else, it is its abundance of “you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up” stories: there are fun human relations stories, stories of fascinating math puzzles, how they are solved and their effect on the contact center, stories of the frustrating need to educate “non-call center folks” about how they influence call center performance, and, far too often, stories of call center failures that, with hindsight, point to a truth in the industry that brings new concepts and ideas to light….
SWPP:Analyze Customer Satisfaction With Standard Call Center Tools
For many contact center executives, answering this question is the call center equivalent to finding the Holy Grail: What is the real relationship between customer satisfaction and service level?
SWPP: Moving From Workforce Manager to Call Center Leader Through Strategic Planning
If you were to Google “managers versus leaders,” you would get well over 500,000 hits. There are many business consultants and experts selling books and seminars, each promising to “turn” us from managers into leaders…
SWPP: Adding the Analytics to “Analytic Systems”
One of the popular buzzwords of the millennium is “analytics” and a slew of analytic systems are now available to provide automated reporting. This makes a lot of sense given corporations spent a whole bunch of money and effort gathering data in the ineties, and many showed little return for it. It follows that the next big hurdle is to take these terabytes of information and put them to good use…
SWPP: Does Accuracy Matter?
I am very proud of my company, Bay Bridge Decision technologies. We’ve brought together a very talented group of mathematicians and industrial engineers who spend a good chunk of their day analyzing ACD data, developing hiring optimization algorithms and contact center simulation models, and ensuring simulation model accuracy against real world call center data…
SWPP: The Ends of Your Economies
One of my call center friends is a customer of ours who runs an extremely large network of contact centers. This is a high-tech firm, with management who are very analytically focused. Their contact centers answer somewhere around one to two million calls a week!
SWPP: The Importance of Planning Part One: Do We Have The Cart Before The Horse?
The Planning Life Cycle
In call centers, our planning cycle is very interesting, and to be honest for most of us, a tad convoluted. When speaking to workforce management professionals, we find that most workforce planning time is spent not on real planning activities, but rather responding to plans gone awry, or explaining why we didn’t achieve our plan. We are, by and large, unplanned planners (sort of an oxymoron), spending most of our time fixing unplanned events…
SWPP: The Importance of Customer Segmentation
Many years ago, I was placed in charge of a team of analysts whose task was to provide decision support to an entire credit card enterprise. For me, it was a dream job. My team and I got to tackle difficult but fascinating projects in all areas of the company, from who to offer credit cards, how much of a credit line to give them, who to offer marketing promotions, who to watch as a credit risk, how to staff customer service and collections, which customers who were late in paying should we call, what payment programs to offer them, how to prioritize collections calling resources, and more…
SWPP: The Big Picture: Performance Forecasting, What Is It, and Why Don’t We Do It?
Let me tell you, as a former forecasting guy, one of the worst things about the job is that there are only three ways your forecasts can go: 1) you can be too high, 2) you can be too low, and 3) you can get the forecast just right—and in truth, nobody gets their forecasts exactly right. In some organizations, meeting with senior executives to discuss your forecast variance can seem like a trip to visit Torquemada during the Spanish Inquisition (did someone mention the Spanish Inquisition?). It is never a walk in the park…
SWPP: Setting the Standard: A Guide for Determining Optimal Service Goals for Inbound Sales Centers
“Tradition!” Despite most companies’ stated focus on profitability, the single most frequent response we get when we ask call center professionals about how they set service goals is that: It’s a tradition! Other top responses include “our industry uses 80/20” and “the boss said so…
SWPP:What-If? Getting It Wrong: What is the Cost of Planning Inefficiencies?
In this article, we will discuss the key areas of error associated with most contact center planning processes, their potential costs, and the key steps you can take to reduce the risk of “getting it wrong…
SWPP: Managing The Time Crunch: Getting Proactive About Performance Management
We have been doing a fair amount of traveling this year, and have met with many people in workforce management. We all have a lot in common: we’re mathematically inclined with an unusual obsession with efficiency, we work to very unworkable deadlines, we are able to assimilate data and ideas from many individuals and organizations, and we are universally leaned upon to save our companies a lot of money while keeping our customers happy…
SWPP:What-If? How to Provide Risk and Sensitivity Analysis of Your Contact Center
How many times has this happened to you? It’s 2:00 PM on Friday and the CFO (or CEO, or Marketing Director, or your boss, or…) has a new “What-If” analysis for you…
SWPP:The Laws of Call Centers: Everything You Ever Wanted to Tell Your Finance and Marketing Friends About Call Centers
Dear Director of Finance or Marketing: The following article, if left on your desk, only represents the views of Ric Kosiba, and not the views of the SWPP, the workforce management community, or the workforce management person who “happened” to leave it there…
SWPP:The Big Picture: Optimizing Your Long-Term Staff Plan
Wow, has it ever been an up and down few years. It certainly hasn’t been an easy time to get our call volume forecasts right. However, there probably hasn’t been a time when getting the yearly staffing plan right would pay such great dividends as right now…