Workforce Engagement Management

Our organization is going live with our first ever all Outbound team that will work voice campaigns. Without the ability to forecast volume (as I'm told you cannot forecast campaign volume), for scheduling breaks and lunches, if we use contiguous work time parameters, the system will schedule all agents for the break/meal activities at the earliest time they are eligible for that activity, resulting in stacking of meals and breaks. In order to avoid this fixed meal and break times will have to determined.

I'm curious as to what other organizations are doing for scheduling outbound only agents and if you are able to create manual forecasts, and if so, what data you're looking at and how you are utilizing that to create a manual forecast.

#Scheduling

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Laura Callaway
Application Analyst
St. Luke's Health System
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Hi

We have similar issues for our outbound agents. A question for you, does it matter if they're breaks overlap/stack? From our perspective it doesn't, as we are in control of the customer interaction ringing out. I can see this may be a challenge though if you have 'best time to call' to optimise. One option we tried was adding breaks into shift sequences, but you would need to create a shift for each agent to spread them out. Not so easy if you have a large team. Good luck

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Karen Bolton
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