It Pays to have Workforce Management Software

Workforce Management software unlocks ROI in Your Contact Center

Move from spreadsheets to workforce management (WFM) software and you’ll quickly boost agent productivity and satisfaction, improve resource management, and free supervisor/manager time. 

Once you decide to move from a spreadsheet-driven scheduling and forecasting to WFM software you have decisions to make about which solution is the best fit for your organization. One of the first questions you’ll be asking is: How quickly can I recoup my WFM investment?

 The investment side of the ROI equation - the software’s purchase price – is critical, of course, but it’s not this blog’s focus. Rather, we’re looking at the return side of the equation - the direct and indirect savings (or cost avoidance) WFM software should help you achieve by:

• Boosting agent productivity/satisfaction
• Reducing scheduling time and errors
• Cutting down on admin time
  

Stabilizing Agent Occupancy. Eliminating Shift Whiplash.

How does the agent experience - keeping them engaged and satisfied - impact ROI? It’s simple: Staffing costs account for the majority of overall expenditures in most contact centers, more than the combined cost of telephony, technology, office premises, fittings, rent and utilities.

• A bad agent experience increases turnover, requiring costly recruitment and training for new agents.
• New agents take weeks or months to reach full proficiency, adding hidden costs.
• Even if experienced agents stay, they may be unhappy and stressed, leading to lower productivity and more absences.

WFM software plays a crucial role in staffing,  shaping the agent experience, and contact center productivity. With accurate forecasting and scheduling, you can optimize your team size and control staffing costs.

You’ll improve agent occupancy, a key indicator of how well you’ve balanced your schedule and how engaged your agents are during their shifts.

Ask yourself:

• Are my agents overwhelmed, moving quickly from call to call, with no downtime between? If so, how is that stress impacting the agent experience, to say nothing of the customer experience?
• Are my agents underutilized, with too many agents handling too few calls? If so, am I paying for a bloated staff?
• If my forecasts are too far off are my agents bouncing from boredom to burnout? Am I constantly over- or understaffed?

Now, think about how your agents’ daily shift schedule flows throughout the week.

• How is an agent’s morale, job satisfaction and performance impacted if they work from 6:00 am to 3:00 pm one day, 12:00 pm to 9:00 pm the next, and 7:00 am to 4:00 pm the day after?
• How much more likely are they to quit if they experience this kind of erratic scheduling over an extended period?

An intuitive WFM software solution with drag-and-drop scheduling capabilities allows schedulers to visualize and test various scenarios, alerting them to imbalances in schedules that may produce agent shift ‘whiplash’ or substandard agent occupancy.

Saving Time While Improving Agent Satisfaction and Staffing Efficiency

Forecast and schedule accuracy skyrockets with the help of AI – and the whole process is automated, saving untold hours of manager/scheduler time and eliminating human error. Managers spending less time on administrative scheduling-related tasks have more time to spend on strategic issues and value-add activities.

AI-powered WFM software automates scheduling by analyzing all factors—shift lengths, breaks, vacations, sick days, channel assignments, and forecasts. It processes thousands of data points per second to create the best schedule for both agents and the contact center.

Once you’ve finalized your schedule it’s critical to ensure agents follow it; that’s central to overall contact center productivity and optimizing staffing costs. A Schedule Adherence tool within your WFM software can help with that.

With a Schedule Adherence tool your WFM solution can:

• Automatically import agent status data to track schedule adherence.
• Detect deviations between planned and actual activities in real time.
• Import data about agent statuses from your contact center platform and use the data as raw material for calculating each agent’s schedule adherence history.
• Detect deviations between agent statuses and scheduled activities.

Schedule adherence is crucial for efficient staffing and meeting SLAs. It provides key insights by answering questions such as:

• What were the agent’s scheduled hours?
• What were his actual working hours?
• What is his calculated adherence?
• How many hours or minutes was this agent out of adherence?
• How many out-of-adherence events occurred within the agent’s shift?

The bottom line is, contact center leaders using WFM software—AI-powered or not—create balanced schedules faster and more reliably than manual Excel methods.

The payoff in terms of service continuity and the customer experience is considerable, and the benefits don’t stop there. Direct and indirect financial returns – just a few of which we discussed here - make WFM software an investment that just makes sense.

For more information on WFM ROI we invite you to visit www.eleveo.com/pricing and interact with our ROI calculator.