Looking for some advice on how to best maximise resource for 100+ volunteer manned call centre for charity organisation. Currently using an excel solution but looking to put something in place to help maximise resource and help ensure consistent rostered attendance. I have previously used Q max and Blue Pumpkin and am pretty certain that these may be out of reach financially.(would be great if someone was able to shed any light on start up and maintenence costs)Has anyone any thoughts/experience on potential solutions be it excel or WFM software?
WFM solution 100+ volunteers
Call Centre Helper Forum » Technology
(7 posts)
Whilst it won't eradicate the cost, some WFM vendors offer hosted solutions or subscription based pricing that allows you to spread the procurement costs over a more manageable time frame
Posted 2 years ago
Dear SRV
You mentioned you previously used QMAX so I'm sure your familiar with the functionality this product (and others) can deliver in terms of optimising the resources you have available. As a Charitable Organisation I am prepared to offer you the full licenced Product FOC in association with you being a member of Callcentre Helper. We can have a dicussion offline about which options suit you best, onsite or hosted and if necessary post the requirements back to this forum to compare other options.
Posted 2 years ago
In my humble opinion, I would stick with an excel spreadsheet. Applying Pareto law, you will gain considerable more insight and management for virtually no costs, especially if every penny has to be watched.
If your ACD can run off CSVs of logged in times etc, then you can simply copy/paste the information into a spreadsheet and it should give you some basic schedule adherence and trending quickly. You might also want to look outside this site for more advanced spreadsheets. I built one a long time ago for my call centre and did pretty much what all of the WFM products do now... forecasted calls, suggested rotas, kept track of schedule adherence and also kept track of meetings sickness and holidays.
It might be useful to know what sort of things you would want to do with WFM. Could you share a little more with me?
Gene
Posted 2 years ago
Gene
Thanks for your advice thats great.
Our main issue is forecasting and attendance. As these guys are volunteers they pick and choose when they want to attend each week. I get to know if Im lucky a couple of days in advance of the working pattern for the next week. Its an absolute nightmare to keep track of given that the current resourcing spreadsheet is huge, has limited capability and is laborious and prone to human error. In order that I try and get some control over resourcing I was looking for a simple solution to show at a glance area's of concern/spikes/troughs for the week/month and also something that is easily maintained. Ive used Erlang to provide me with my capacity requirements but its the actual rota building with meetings, sickness and hols etc that I was keen on developing.
Posted 2 years ago
If I remember correctly, you can calculate time across a spreadsheet and then run a formula to add the number of cells that are within a particular time window. This will give you a sum of the number of people doing a certain task. You can then create a column for breaks, sick, out, in, lunch, whatever. Then, perhaps on another page on your spreadsheet, you can make forumals to add up the number of people expected in across certain time intervals (say every 30 minutes) you can create a column for your erlang calc, and then the sums on the prevous sheets for which people will be in and when.
I accept its a fair bit of work, which is why I suggested trawling the net for something that might satisfy your need. It's not impossible to develop, but it does take a very good level of knowledge of Excel and some visual basic skills to create certain scripts for repetitive tasks.
I hope this helps srv. Let me know if I can be of any further assistance.
Gene
Posted 2 years ago
Interesting discussion on the use of spreadsheets versus a full Workforce Management solution. I think both have a place but it simply comes down to how long does it take to produce the work schedules, manage the Rota's (full time workers, shift workers etc), react to unforeseen events realtime, get team buy-in to new schedules etc. A simple ROI spreadsheet can demonstrate through time savings how cost effective a WFM solution would be over a manual spreadsheet method.
Posted 1 year ago
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