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There's a constant tension between staffing and cost.

In contact centers, having too few people means customers have to wait too long for someone to answer the phone, start a chat session, or reply to an email. On the flip side, staffing too many agents can waste money.

There has to be a middle ground.

I interviewed Brad Cleveland, customer experience consultant and author of Contact Center Management on Fast Forward, to get his take on contact center staffing and discover some solutions to this challenge.

Cleveland shared some unexpected insights, such as how keeping customers on hold can increase costs. Many customers will simultaneously contact a company via other channels such as chat, email, and social media when they're waiting on hold for a long time. 

I've been guilty of doing this myself. I call it a channel race and the idea is to see which channel solves my problem first.

The challenge from the company's perspective is each of those contacts engages a different agent, which increases costs. It also makes it more difficult to keep track of a customer's story when they're using multiple channels at once.

Here are a few more topics Cleveland discussed in our interview:

• Why companies should make it easier to get a live person on the phone.

• How to save money by reducing wait times.

• How to use existing staffing levels more effectively.

• When cross-training can hurt productivity.

• Why it's essential to forecast for non-phone channels.

Here's the full 21 minute interview.

I also highly recommend Cleveland's book, Contact Center Management on Fast Forward. It's an essential guide for anyone leading a contact center. You can find it on Amazon.