Managing contact centres is a mammoth task and even more so when you have to manage staff holidays and days off. You need to make sure that you have enough staff covering the phones and make sure that you keep the delicate balance between keeping staff moral up and not allowing holidays to affect your operational costs.
The TotalView Vacation and Holiday Planner enable you to simplify the whole process, from selecting possible holidays to approving the entire workforce’s time off. This will save a lot of administration time and allows you to set rules for all of your call centre agents giving them more control over their paid and unpaid leave.
This programme is designed to cut down on operational time and ensure that you will have enough staff to cover the call centre every day of the year. It gives your call centre agents the chance to ask for holidays through an online request service which will approve the days automatically if the call centre is adequately staffed.
The TotalView Vacation and Holiday Planner do not just cover holiday requests. It is also possible to use it for managing sick leave and personal leave each which have different rates and different restrictions. There are rules which can be set so that you cap the number of agents who take time off each day and also you have the ability to monitor the amount of half-days and early finishes each staff member has.
Another unique feature of this programme is the ability to customise it for each area of the call centre. Obviously different departments have different needs so each location can be managed separately.
Call centre agents can view the holiday request screen individually which allows them to see which dates are available. They are easy to use and will not let anyone book a holiday if there is not enough cover for them. It is up to the agents themselves to make sure they book their holidays well enough in advance so that they can have the leave – It works on a purely first come first serve basis.
There will obviously be some people who miss out on the dates that they wanted because they booked them too late, but this is the same with or without this programme. However, it is possible for those who missed out to place themselves on a waiting list in case the dates become available. If somebody does cancel their holiday, as a manager you can customise the way you deal with this. You can set it so that the first person on the waiting list automatically gets the dates or you can reserve it and give it to which you choose to.
Once you install the vacation and holiday planner, you will immediately see how much of your time is freed up. There is no need to personally deal with individual holiday requests or queries so you will have more tie to spend on the running of your business.
At the end of the day, holidays are important to everyone in a workplace and it is important that everyone has a fair share of annual leave. By installing this programme, you are ensuring that your employees take an active role in booking their preferred holiday dates.