With plenty of employees, irregular shifts, and a whole host of working patterns, call centres are prime candidates for confusion and common shift scheduling problems. Luckily, many have discovered a simple and effective solution: using Findmyshift as their online employee scheduling tool.
Not only does having an efficient system save managers and employees valuable time each week, but it can also improve attendance and punctuality, saving your organisation its hard-earned cash. Read more below to see exactly how you can use Findmyshift to quickly and easily schedule your call centre shifts online.
Maintain one single source of truth
There’s nothing worse than the confusion that arises when people are working from different versions of the the supposed same employee schedule. Crossed out and photocopied pen and paper rotas aren’t good enough for the pace of life we live these days, with everyone expected to be more available and flexible than ever before.
The consequences can range from tardiness to missed shifts, and these have unpleasant repercussions for managers as well as frontline employees. Unmanned phones are not what productive call centres need!
With Findmyshift, your rota lives online, is easily-accessible and is always up to date. Any changes made are reflected in real-time so that anyone logging into the system automatically sees the very latest version.
Schedule flexibly in advance
There’s no limit to how in advance you can assign and plan shifts. Now, we’re not suggesting you should tie people down to the working hours for the next year, but because swapping shifts and rescheduling is so quick and easy, you can forecast as far forwards as you need to. This can help management to plan costs in advance and prepare for busy times, while employees can get in early requests for holidays or adjust their hours to suit them.
Grant easy access but stay in control
Requesting changes to a rota is easy for an employee to do: they simply login to the site, find their rota and by using the right-click menu they can either cancel their assigned shift or request to be put on a cancelled shift. In this way, employees can quickly and easily swap shifts.
Of course, you may want certain employees on at certain times, particularly if you’re training new frontline staff or know you have busier times that need your most efficient call-handlers. For that reason, changes are made only with managerial approval.
Save time with shift templates
If your call centre has the same shift patterns that run on a regular basis, you don’t want to spend time writing up those timings each week. Instead, you can save these patterns as templates, allowing you to quickly and easily reuse them whenever you need them. This is especially useful if your call centre’s working hours can vary throughout the year. For more, check out this post on how you can save time with shift templates.
Noticeboards keep everyone on the same page
Whether you have a new call script, a change in procedure, or just details of the office Christmas party, you want a quick and easy way to push information to all your employees. Why not use the rota they’ll be checking on a regular basis instead of the tattered corkboard by the water cooler that no one ever looks at?
Findmyshift provides you with an online noticeboard where you can pin announcements, attach files, and send messages to your employees all in one handy place. That way you can ensure everyone knows what’s going on and exactly where to look for the information again if they forget.
Unlimited employees at one low price
Unlike many other tools that charge you for every single person on your rota, at Findmyshift, we charge one uniform price per rota. And because there’s no limit on how many employees you can have on a single rota, that means your scheduling costs are simply the price of our affordable plan: £22 a month and you’re covered for all your staff. We even offer discounts for paying in advance, so be sure to have a look at our pricing plans for the full lowdown.
Built-in time clock and breaks keep costs low and morale high
If you’re running a successful centre, your employees will be working hard handling calls. This might mean that sometimes you need them to work a bit later at busy times. Equally, they might need a break from providing polite assistance every now and then during the day.
With our inbuilt time clock, employees can punch in and out of their shifts and record their breaks, so you can reward their hard work without taking a financial hit, monitoring and paying for the actual hours they work.
Payroll made easy
Following on from tracked employee hours, Findmyshift also includes reporting functions so you can turn those hours worked on the phones into payroll data and expense forecasts. With scope for varying pay scales and even overtime, it’s easy to get your financials automatically calculated for you, keeping you on top of costs in real-time. Read more on how Findmyshift makes reporting easy here.
Don’t forget reminders!
How could we? Of course, no breakdown of the Findmyshift offering would be complete without mention of our reminders. Whether it’s emails about shift changes, automated text alerts, or in-app messages through our simple Android and iOS apps, you can choose exactly how and when your employees are reminded about where they need to be and when.
On top of that, employees can always login to the site at any time to check the latest status of their scheduled hours. Watch tardiness tumble and missed shifts magically disappear thanks to Findmyshift. It’ll save you time, money, and management headaches!