Many businesses, like call centers, are investing in state of the art telephone technology and placing their energy into creating elaborate skits designed at capitalizing on outstanding customer service and intra-business communication. But in reality, there's one thing that can make or break a call center-agents, and lots of the them. Without the right number of agents on shift, or even the right types of customer care specialist summoned to duty on particular projects, call centers can fall by the waist side and go floating overseas, where many phone banks have relocated over the past decade. Invest in call center scheduling software for you business. While some software developers are attaching hefty pricetags to such software, managing a more efficient phone bank with the help of call center scheduling software doesn't have to break the bank.

Portage Communications Incorporated is the self-proclaimed producer of "call center software for maximum productivity." It's a title that they hope to hang on to with their latest answer to the call center scheduling software craze, the AgentTime Scheduler. Dubbed as "the affordable agent scheduling solution," Portage's AgentTime Scheduler offers many attractive perks for call center supervisors of small to medium sized call centers. For starters, AgentTime conveniently creates agent schedules by making use of the listing of agents programmed into the database, agent's scheduling preferences, and shift definitions.

The AgentTime Scheduler works as one of the conference call services with the aide of Call Center Designer, and the SimACD Staffing Software. The Call Center Designer component of the call center scheduling software alerts call center managers to the mathematics of just how many agents they will need as well as the number of inbound lines that will be open during the weekday. While the SimACD Software, on the other hand, creates a computer simulated test of how smoothly operations will run with a given number of agents "manning" the estimated number of open inbound lines-this gives supervisors a better idea of what number agents will be needed during the shift in question. Schedules can then be easily modified, and customizing the schedules to accomodate fifteen minute breaks, lunch, and dinner is never a problem. The AgentTime Call Center Scheduling Software starts at just under five thousand dollars for a call center of twenty-five employees or less.

The EDP Software Company created SchedulePro Call Center Scheduling Software especially for all of those call center supervisors really frustrated with slaving over the schedules for their call center agents each week. The folks over at EDP want you to save yourself some time and you can keep your money in your pockets, SchedulePro is an automated call center scheduling software program that's excellence rate is demonstrated in the eighty percent drop in scheduling time that call center managers experience after making the switch to SchedulePro.

SchedulePro keeps a monitor on staffing levels, they want to make sure that you have all of the agent's butts parked in seats that you will need. SchedulePro will even help you find a fill-in when one of your scheduled agents calls out.

· The ability to define different shifts

· Keep track of employee sick leave and vacation time

· Printing shift lists and management reports

· Get rid of the timecard with SchedulePro's printed timesheets

Left Bank Solutions works with businesses worldwide to develop software geared toward "workforce optimization." In their quest to deliver optimum customer care, Left Bank is the proud brain behind the Monet line of call center scheduling software for small and medium level call centers. There are three Monet scheduling systems to choose from. They are the Monet Workforce Management System, the Money AnyWhere, and the Monet WFM OnDemand-the newest addition to the Left Bank family.