Demand driven scheduling is key to maximising results and efficiency in customer support teams. With more and more companies opting to offer extended or 24/7 opening hours, additional channels or languages to match the expectations of todays customers, it’s never been more important to stay flexible and proactive in your planning.

By creating shift schedules to follow inflow arrival patterns, teams can ensure they have sufficient headcount to meet their goals. However, without a fine-tuned intraday schedule, all this hard work can be lost.

We’ve heard countless pain points from teams being held back by insufficient and inflexible tools for scheduling. At Surfboard, we believe that you can create fair and efficient schedules through smarter automation.

That’s why we’re proud to announce another upgrade to our already powerful activity plan feature, allowing schedulers to automate even the most complex requirements and ways of working.

Plan once, schedule over and over

Our activity plans let teams generate intraday schedules at the click of a button. Enter your requirements, from coverage to admin or development time, set your priority and that’s it – a schedule will be dynamically created to meet your goals with capacity available.

However, we’ve found that each team’s own unique needs require further control to replicate their unique requirements.

Teams can now enter even more granular requirements to ensure Surfboard always finds the perfect person for the right channel at the right time. Choose from a combination of team, skills, shift, and more, allowing for even smarter automated schedule generation.

Personalised, automated scheduling

For many teams, activities or responsibilities need to be paired together to work efficiently. For example, if a surfer is working on ‘Return Requests’ in the morning, then they should also have ‘Admin Time’ scheduled to act on these returns later in the day.

On the flip-side, sometimes you want to veto certain activities based on the rest of the schedule. If a surfer has been working on an intense, high volume live channel, you may want to keep them off phones for the rest of the day afterwards.

To account for this, we’ve included advanced options to schedule surfers based on the other responsibilities they have or don’t have each day. Perfect for multi-lingual teams who want to protect their agent’s sanity by keeping them to one language per day!

Hands-free break planning

Break planning is a critical aspect of any support team’s day-to-day operations. With our latest tools, it’s easier than ever for teams to plan breaks in a contract and labor law-compliant manner – while optimising for coverage.

Simply assign breaks based on the length of shift and set the length of the break to match working hours. Surfboard can dynamically choose the perfect time to schedule the break, maintaining compliance, while also offering tools to stagger start time, improving your coverage.

Empowering efficiency with Surfboard

At Surfboard, we believe that no organisation should compromise its operational efficiency due to perceived complexity. Our suite of end-to-end Workforce Management (WFM) tools empowers teams to work smarter, not harder. Say goodbye to cumbersome spreadsheets and embrace the future of support scheduling with Surfboard.

Ready to revolutionise your support function? Take a tour of our app or book a demo with our team to discover how Surfboard can transform your operations.