The Perennial Issues Employee Pooling Can Solve for Contact Centers
Idle employee time is probably the biggest challenge for business owners and HR personnel when it comes to call centre industry where the need for human resource depends on multiple factors and vary quite substantially.
The call centre who is handling the helpline of a courier service can see a surge in incoming calls/chats during the Christmas season when people are using the service to send and receive gifts. However, hiring extra hands to help out during this period might prove not to be a great strategy because once the season is over, the incoming queries will dwindle to the original number. Not hiring enough hands, on the other hand, will lead to long wait time for the customers and congestion in the network which is “bad for business” for the courier company and subsequently the call centre.
The solution? Elastic staffing.
The process is exactly what the name suggests. The call centre (manpower) owners can actually list their available (or, surplus) manpower for easy leasing. The call centre who needs it can simply hire this for a limited period where the limited period can be the rush hours or rush weeks, like the Christmas week in our example. It solves two problems.
- The call centre in our example now neither need to hire extra hands and pay for idle employees later nor helplessly watch as the network congestion grows, ruining their reputation.
- The surplus manpower owners can now easily encash the idle time of the employees and make the most of his available manpower.
Taking this concept even further, now a freelancer can enlist his services on a pay-per-hour (or another payment model of his choice) and the call centre owners can hire him/her during crunch times to manage the need more efficiently.
This means, the contact centres
- Don’t need to rely on predictions and statistics for the optimum staff requirements. The sophisticated software cost a substantial amount of money while the older Excel sheet method takes a substantial amount of effort.
- Don’t need to take help from a recruitment agency as the buyer to seller direct contact is established. This eliminates not only the charges of a recruitment agency but also the effort it takes to manage them effectively.
Let us simplify the dry theory with a use case scenario.
Alex is the owner of the contact centre which ‘might’ need additional human resources during next week as Alex is expecting a surge in user interaction. Bob is the owner or representative of a pool of 25 trained contact centre experts. Bob charges $10 per hour per employee.
Alex notices a network consumption of 90% of his own available resources and places an order to Bob for 5 extra resources for next 12 hours.
Alex pays Bob $10*5*12 = $600 towards charges. Immediately 5 from Bob’s group are assigned to Alex who will cater for Alex’s incoming interaction for the next 12 hours.
This is a very simplistic approach. There can be several questions on this solution.
1. How does Alex know that Bob will deliver after receiving the money?
2. How would Alex know that the hired hands are fit for his requirements?
3. How does Alex re-hire them or can this process be automated?
4. And most importantly, how does Alex find Bob?
The answer to all these questions is blockchain. All of these issues can be handled using Smart Contracts and peer to peer, decentralised marketplace, something exactly which Qubicles is creating.
Learn more about Qubicles at https://podone.io
Read the Qubicles whitepaper https://podone.io/whitepaper
