Scheduled Breaks Are Still Relevant

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Paul Stitt looks at why scheduled break times still have a place in the era of agile working.

Taking a well-deserved break away from the phones, whether it be for a walk, coffee, lunch or even a cigarette can help agents recharge and enjoy their shift.

In this era of agile working, whilst very productive and motivational, planners can still schedule breaks – even if agents work from home via an agent portal.

Scheduling breaks helps planners to better predict capacity

Using workforce management (WFM) software, planners can schedule breaks based on forecast workload and, thanks to smartphones, agents who are away from their desks can set up notifications alerting them when they are due back.

Scheduling breaks obviously helps us to understand and better predict capacity, but what happens when we allow agents to take a break when they need it?

Scheduling success is dependent on agents sticking to the plan

The success of such a scenario is dependent upon the commitment of agents and supervisors to meeting the service goal by taking breaks when it makes sense to do so and having planned meetings.

Otherwise, chaos can ensue as giving such freedom can make it difficult to predict how people might behave. A forecaster will argue: what is the value of our adherence measure if agents can update their schedule to match what actually happened?

There may be some good examples out there where contact centres are gaining efficiencies from not scheduling breaks, but it’s difficult to ignore the fact that WFM has been around for over 30 years – using clever algorithms to do the number crunching for us and leaving nothing to chance.

The industry-standard, best-practice approach is to adopt a WFM tool that will populate breaks where it deems optimal having considered the forecast workload. When staffing isn’t matching the actual workload then breaks can be rescheduled by supervisors dependent on the call volume and all at the click of a mouse.

Paul Stitt

Paul Stitt

It’s worth pointing out for those of you that are not yet WFM converts, it’s not about restricting your agents.

It’s about giving them flexibility and even control by building in rules and allowing time-off requests, as well as requests to move breaks, with approval being based on what the impact would be on service level.

With thanks to Paul Stitt at injixo

Author: Megan Jones

Published On: 5th Aug 2015 - Last modified: 12th Feb 2019
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