Staffing a Contact Center

Editor’s Note: This is Web-only bonus coverage from “Tools for Smarter Staffing” in the November issue of CU Management.

Staffing and scheduling a contact center is slightly different than staffing and scheduling branches.

“You do have some nuances, in that a lot of contact centers will have longer hours, and there will be more shift work,” says Meredith Deen, chief operating officer of Financial Management Solutions Inc., Alpharetta, Ga. “Our clients also tend to be more open to part-timers in the call center.”

That’s true at $700 million/95,000-member Michigan First Credit Union, where Call Center Assistant Vice President Joan Gonthier uses FMSI’s Omnix Performance Analytics to crunch data, just as her counterparts do at the branches. More part-timers are available for peak times, but otherwise, it’s similar.

“We still use the same metrics,” she says. “We can see that on average our calls are, I would say, three minutes. We don't want to see them over four. The same way that if a financial service representative [in the branch] was with a member for over an hour, if we see a phone member service representative in double digits, we'll go over to see if they need any help.”

In the last year, Michigan First CU, with 265 employees in Lathrup Village, Mich., has scrapped the call center’s 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. hours and gone 24/7.

“We are the only credit union in the state that has a state-wide charter,” says SVP/Branch Operations Janet Ososki. “We feel in order to service potential members all over the state, we needed to have a 365/24/7 call center that they can have access to at any time, day, night, weekend, holiday etc.

“This is 100 percent kept in house. We added five supervisors and approximately 15 new team members to cover the additional shifts. We also will make new debit cards at any time, day or night. If the member misplaces their card, they can come into the credit union and pick up a new one. The building lobby is open 24/7/365 so members have access to our MoneyNow ATM machines at all times also.”

The change in hours will affect how the CU staffs shifts because peak times this year will likely be different from last year, when members only had certain hours in which to call. Gonthier is still recalibrating the baselines, and in coming months she’ll make changes based on the new data.

CUES member Stephanie Graves, teller operations manager at $530 million/55,000-member Gulf Winds Federal Credit Union, with 155 employees in Pensacola, Fla., says there are more part-time member service representatives at her credit union’s contact center than full-time, and the center needs to be staffed for slightly different peaks than the branches do—an influx of calls the day before a holiday, rather than on key payroll dates, for example.

In addition, there’s some complexity around different types of contact center employees. “Our contact center is combined between our lenders and our MSRs,” she explains. “There are maybe 12 to 15 MSRs who answer basic questions, and they’re running close to 80 to 90 percent efficiency, which is very high—it could maybe even be a little lower for them be most effective. [The manager] uses the scheduling tool more for [MSRs] than for the lenders. The lenders are all full-time, so they're here Monday through Friday, 40 hours a week.”

At $2.2 billion/198,000-member WSECU, with 500 employees in Olympia, Wash., branch employees are universal agents and are interchangeable on the schedule. But that’s not the case at the 55-seat call center. The center fields about 60,000 calls a month, plus Web traffic and inbound lending calls. To help serve members more efficiently, the CU uses skill-based routing, channeling calls to employees who are subject matter experts. Metrics from CUES Supplier member Bancography, Birmingham, Ala., help managers know how many of each type of specialist are needed at each hour of the day.

In an environment this large and complex, a spreadsheet isn’t sufficient to manage employee hours, says CUES member Gary Swindler, SVP/service delivery.

“For all the scheduling there, we use something called Community, a workforce management tool [from Workforce Management Software Group, Inc., Frisco, Texas]. We have one person who’s dedicated to working with that software to do all the scheduling. I think it's just the sheer volume of calls, plus the diversity of those calls, that makes that necessary.”

Jamie Swedberg is a freelance writer based in Athens, Ga.