Every Philippine call center should highly prioritize time management. Being able to properly manage a schedule is the key to every productive business operation. But what makes it even more important is the fact that Philippine based contact centers handle geographically diverse clients and largely employ the younger workforce that is prone to distractions at work.
Being industry leaders, call centers must stay competitive so they can’t afford to have time management and productivity issues. If your business is outsourcing voice services to one, it is important to ensure that your outsourcing partner employs a proactive time management system that tracks deadlines and ensures proper time allocation per task at an organizational level—from each department, down to every agent.
Managing the time of the administration
The senior administration should have a time management system that is in line with the call center’s overall strategic direction to ensure attainable and realistic deadlines.
For instance, if the call center’s new client wants to launch a telemarketing campaign by the end of the month, the administration’s recruitment and training activities should be finished weeks ahead of the launch. In addition, the managers should know the capacities of the employees working under them to ensure attainable results. This way, they can precisely gauge if a certain task they assign could be carried out by their team within the allotted time.
The administration should allow enough time for the employees to learn new processes, while new technologies or systems should be evaluated for efficiency. Otherwise, learning to use these new technologies could be delayed by technical issues, while employee training on new processes may be a waste if management decides to discontinue using them.
Managing the time of the agents
Every Philippine call center employee must have a time tracking tool to help the company accurately track daily tasks. To ensure that the agents comply with its use, logging in and out on time should have a major impact on their performance evaluations. You could also encourage your staff to map their own timetable, which should include job-related tasks and personal time-offs. Having this would let them know which activities consume most of their schedule, thus enabling them to prioritize more important duties over unimportant ones.
Eliminating unnecessary tasks from the employees’ set of duties could also help them manage their time effectively. Data overload, for instance, has been known as a common hindrance to productivity and efficiency in call centers, so be sure that this isn’t a problem in your call center. If you see signs of data overload lowering work quality, consider investing in a call center software that automates tasks such as data encoding, retrieval, and collection. With this, your staff could focus more on serving your customers.
As they say, time is money. Mismanage it, and you could lose not just time but revenues as well. As time is a precious commodity, optimize its use to assure that it is well spent in your call center.