How to boost customer and employee satisfaction with call center human resources software

Managing employees in a call center environment – especially hourly-based call reps – can be a daunting task, even on a good day. But there’s no need for call center managers to feel like they’re herding cats. Using a proper call center workforce management software tool, their jobs can be greatly simplified.

Until the robots take over in some distant future, call centers will remain a very people-based business. Managing people in today’s world means using a variety of CRM, call center and HR software tools to handle workforce management, payroll reporting, hourly activity tracking, call volume reporting, and lots more.

The good news: When done right, a number of these formidable tasks can be combined and automated within a single call center HR solution, resulting in overall improvement in both employee and customer satisfaction. And best of all, it can be done affordably.

Since they’re doing it anyway

Call reps are typically active throughout the day in a CRM or similar application. Since they will be working out of this main application anyway, why not use their activity to build your payroll and hourly tracking reports for HR?

A good call center solution will have the ability to track login and logout times, require a logout reason (for meetings, breaks, end of shift, etc.), and accrue hours worked each day using this information. Taking it a step further, a call center HR solution should provide employees the ability to view their accumulated hours for a given pay period, request and review paid time off (PTO) requests, and make inquiries to their HR department.

By integrating HR aspects into their main call center application, it removes a layer of complexity for employees, streamlines their clock-in and clock-out procedures, and provides a central hub for employees and HR to interact.

Easy management

Employees and even management can be fearful of HR — and in certain situations, rightly so. HR has a difficult task in managing employees, keeping track of payroll deadlines, and staying on top of numerous HR issues that arise daily. This can sometimes cause the HR team to seem a bit gruff or grumpy. But by streamlining and incorporating your HR tasks into your main call center application, you can avoid many of these frustrations.

A good call center HR solution should provide employees an easy way to track their hours, give management insight into hours worked in a given pay period, and offer an easy-to-use mechanism for requesting and tracking paid time off. In addition, the system should allow proactive email alerts when employees log in late, when hours worked thresholds are met (or not met), or when payroll due dates are approaching.

The end of a pay period can be a stressful time for many HR managers. By merging your HR tasks into your main call center application, you can streamline and alleviate many of these frustrations. When done right, just a few clicks can result in properly formatted payroll reports ready for submission to your payroll provider.

Same page, good results

Communication and mutual understanding can facilitate a happy work environment. One of the main goals of call center human resources software should be adequate reporting so that HR, managers and employees can all be on the same page.

This can be achieved in a variety of ways. For our solutions, we like to include employee HR dashboards, easy-to-use reports for management and robust HR tools. A good employee dashboard should give employees a single page view of their progress that month, not only in regards to payroll but their performance in the call center.

For management, similar tools (via a dashboard or reports) should provide them a bird’s-eye view of employee activity with the ability to drill down for further detail. Then, of course, HR needs the proper tools for managing payroll, adding and editing employee records, and generating the appropriate exports for calculating bonuses and submitting payroll.