Solving Understaffing Without Overtime Pay

Mismatches in staffing and demand are a key cost driver for most contact centers, which often find themselves with too few or too many employees on the clock. Overstaffing, of course, directly increases staffing costs, but understaffing also has a significant effect on the contact center in the form of reduced customer satisfaction (CSAT scores), more frequent overtime and decreased employee engagement scores.

Contact center leaders can’t plan for everything. Surprise events, like an agent who calls out sick or an unplanned service incident, constantly affect intraday scheduling needs and contribute to understaffing. The situation is complicated further by the reality that gaps in the schedule can be hard to fill without the enticement of overtime pay. Agents might not want to change their schedules or prefer not to work extra hours unless there’s an incentive such as overtime premium pay. But overtime pay creates a hefty bill for contact centers: Costs quickly add up, eating away at margins and revenue.

What’s needed is a new way to solve understaffing challenges while reducing overtime costs in the process. Finding that balance enables contact centers to approach net-zero staffing levels while delivering the high-quality service demanded by today’s customers. And doing so is easier than it seems. New technology solutions empower workforce management leaders with intelligent automation that makes it possible to strike the right balance to get close to net-zero staffing.

Why many tech solutions can’t deliver

Many contact centers have tried to control costs by simply disallowing overtime, which eliminates cost but can have a negative effect on CSAT scores. With fewer agents available, average handle times and average speed of answer quickly skyrocket, forcing contact centers to compromise on quality and creating disgruntled customers. Without extra team support, agents can feel overworked and stretched too thin, which in turn has effects on schedule adherence and attrition. While this practice reduces costs, it also erects plenty of new roadblocks that get in the way of contact center success.

Other contact centers try to tackle the understaffing problem by staffing up with a greater number of part-time agents, prescheduling fewer hours for them, then scheduling those part-timers for additional hours as needed to meet staffing demand. While this is a viable solution, many contact centers struggle to implement a large base of part-time workers due to location, culture or the nature of the business. Moreover, the intricacy of manual intraday scheduling often overwhelms managers.

Yet another option for contact centers is to schedule full-time agents for just under 40 hours with the understanding that their remaining hours will be determined by intraday changes. That probably sounds like a nightmare for scheduling – and for good reason. Day-to-day changes can happen rapidly and unexpectedly without much time for supervisors to reach out to agents with offers of extra hours. And this approach puts a formidable burden on supervisors: They need to identify opportunities for extra hours, research how a potential change would impact the schedule, be in near-constant communication with agents to see if they’re available and approve each change.

Each of these alternative approaches requires a lot of time and has significant potential for error. So how can workforce management leaders make sure that the right agents are available at the right time?

Intelligent, proactive staffing delivers immediate ROI

Contact center leaders can walk the fine line necessary to achieve close to net-zero staffing while reducing the need for overtime pay by utilizing a technology solution that’s powered by intelligent automation. Automation makes it easy to leverage the flexibility of part-time agents, schedule full-time agents for less than 40 hours, and then make up the gap based on intraday variances. By automating communications and optimization, and proactively guiding agents to be available when needed, contact centers can eliminate the need for human intervention and realize ROI from Day One. Here’s how to do so.

Self-swapping: While it might seem like the only way to solve understaffing is to add overtime, proactive automated staffing enables agents to trade hours with themselves without changing their total hours. This concept is known as a “self-swap.” For example, an agent may agree to take on extra hours today to meet a sudden rise in customer demand in exchange for getting off early tomorrow or in a few days.

With self-swapping, shifts can be moved around within the same day, time can be exchanged between multiple days, and shifts can be adjusted in 30-minute increments. Agents view available changes via a self-service portal that shows only those changes that are beneficial to the contact center. As a result, contact centers can move agents from overstaffed intervals to understaffed ones.

What enables these changes to happen on the fly is a unique capability of proactive staffing: automated, guided and pre-approved self-service. Schedule changes don’t need to be run by a manager to be completed – instead, they happen instantaneously. And complex, asymmetrical changes can be completed to meet contact centers’ staffing needs. Because changes are intelligently automated, proactive scheduling allows a single shift change to be broken down into smaller increments. Changes can be spread out over several days or involve multiple employees.

Because agents make changes of their own volition in alignment with their preferences, they gain control over their schedules and feel more autonomous in their work, leading to happier agents who are more likely to stay long-term. 

Automated communication: Reacting effectively to peaks and valleys in staffing needs requires lightning-fast response times, and this isn’t realistic for managers who are handling day-to-day contact center needs. To solve this problem, automated, guided staffing actively identifies when hours are needed and immediately and automatically pushes notifications to agents in the form of text/SMS alerts, emails and app popups to fill gaps in the schedule. Agents can then quickly accept or decline the offer – no person-to-person communication needed.

In the process, agents can take advantage of schedule changes that meet their preferences, while staffing levels are effortlessly optimized. Overstaffing is less likely to occur because a greater number of scheduled hours are proactively based on intraday and near-term needs.

Skills and skill levels can vary widely between agents, though, and each agent has his or her own scheduling preferences. So, to deliver high quality service, intelligent staffing solutions also account for differences in agent capability as well as shift preferences, preferred communication channels (such as text or email) and time-of-day communication preferences. 

Understaffing elimination and overtime reduction are just the beginning

While automated, guided self-service staffing removes many of the barriers to understaffing and elimination of overtime, it also creates operational efficiencies that maximize the power of organizations’ employees. Because guided staffing fully automates intraday optimization, it relieves supervisors of the time they would normally spend managing schedule changes. No direct communication between supervisor and agent is needed, saving contact centers substantial time that would otherwise be spent coordinating schedule changes manually. Those hours can be better applied to coaching and other critical tasks.

Unlock greater staffing ROI with intelligent automation

Leveraging guided self-service staffing empowers contact centers to target excessive overtime while improving employee engagement. In doing so, it puts goals to improve CSAT scores, meet SLAs and achieve other key metrics easily within reach. Understaffing isn’t the only problem that proactive staffing can solve – these same capabilities can be used to address overstaffing as well by incentivizing voluntary time off, paid time off and self-swapping out of overstaffed shifts. Ultimately, this approach puts the power of automation in the hands of contact center leaders and makes finding the right staffing balance painless.

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