Optimizing Resources, Satisfying Customers

The term 'workforce management (WFM) solution' refers to management software tools that optimize contact centers and back offices. A WFM solution provides the foundation for delivering high-quality customer interactions; it helps planners put the right person with the right skill sets in the right seat at the right time to service customer demand, regardless of the customer's method of contact.

As any scheduler can attest, achieving those objectives is not easy; it requires balancing a range of operational issues and stakeholder interests, from customers to agents and managers. It's even trickier for those still using manual, Excel spreadsheet-driven processes. Transformational technologies, like artificial intelligence and automation, used in conjunction with WFM software, significantly enhance operational efficiency and employee engagement by automating the forecasting and scheduling process and strengthening agent performance management and adherence monitoring..

With multi-channel interactions proliferating, and with the growing demand for multi-skilled, geographically dispersed agents, planners today face challenges of unprecedented complexity. Call centers are ripe for improvements. Significant operational efficiency gains and customer satisfaction improvements are certainly achievable with WFM software playing a critical role.

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Six WFM Processes

We define six interconnected WFM processes:

forecasting
planning
scheduling
operations
reporting
performance analytics

These processes are integral to modern contact center operations. They're key to increasing customer satisfaction (minimizing customer churn), enhancing staff satisfaction (lowering absenteeism, attrition, and training costs) and improving operational efficiency.

We'll further address some basic questions about automated WFM solutions: e.g., Which contact centers are suitable candidates for WFM automation? Where and when can you see your return on investment (ROI)? We also provide some tips about what to consider when contemplating a WFM solution for your contact center.

Your Contact Center – Your Face to the World

The contact center is the heartbeat of many organizations. It is where customers turn for guidance, complaints, information, and making purchases. It's where customer interactions take place when attitudes and brand loyalty are most at stake. In many ways, the quality of the customer experience you deliver determines the overall success of your organization.

WFM is an exercise in optimization and an operational philosophy that strives for continuous improvement in customer service, employee satisfaction, and operational excellence. Managing the workforce is a balancing act. You're trying to satisfy the demands of customers, staff, and management.

Customers expect fast, professional service;

Staff expects work-life balance and work satisfaction;

Management expects efficient, profitable, sustainable operations.

Forecasting – Flexibility & Accuracy Are Absolute Musts

WFM tools must forecast demand accurately. They're expected to predict the peaks and valleys in the volume of inbound calls, emails and chats throughout the day, week, month, season, sometimes in minute-to-minute intervals. Your WFM software should then match staffing requirements with that demand.

Forecasting is the foundation. Successful forecasts require input: historical data pertaining to handling times, arrival patterns, shrinkage, efficiency, and the like. But since volume is largely activity-driven, organizational units, such as marketing, must provide insights into their past experience and future promotional plans so the contact center planner can define targets, results, trends, changes, etc.

Responsibility for WFM’s usefulness doesn’t lie exclusively with the contact center, primarily because call volume is often driven by factors that fall into the realm of other organizational functions – e.g., invoicing, sales, IT, HR, marketing, and production. Invoicing, for instance, is frequently based on the organization’s need to optimize cash flow. Invoicing cycles often spark the peak demand for contact center resources, but they don’t always account for contact center staff or seat limitations.

Use Case - A Marketing Campaign Increases Call Volume

Let’s take an example of a sales-focused contact center. Suppose the company has just launched an ad campaign on TV encouraging customers to call an 800 number. This will create call volume spikes. The campaign’s success is contingent upon the availability and expertise of agents in the contact center. Without the adequate staff resources on-hand to handle these spikes, potential sales opportunities from ready-to-buy customers could turn into a loss of brand reputation. After all, who is in the mood to buy after sitting on-hold for an extended period of time?

It's vital that organizational units, like Marketing, which are dependent on the contact center, have a well-designed process for reporting activities that may impact call volumes. Without being prompted, these units need to regularly feed relevant information to the WFM team about plans that may drive increased call volumes. In this sales-focused example, all experiences from past campaigns should be used as input for forecasts of future contact volumes. Once the WFM team captures this input, forecasters can do their job with much greater precision.

Plans Change - Accounting for 'What Ifs'

Bear in mind that forecasts must be updated continually until the schedule goes live. Accuracy is key. Without precise input from the other organizational units, the role of the contact center is relegated to little more than a goalkeeper – or worse, a firefighter.

Sometimes, situations escalate rapidly. Here, flexibility in forecasting is crucial. Forecasts are worthless if you’re unable to alter schedules in real-time. Most WFM forecasting capabilities today factor in exceptions – campaign periods, holidays, training, and the like – to calculate the impact on the contact center.

Advanced WFM solutions offer a “what-if” scenario tool to help gauge changes in the workload (described later). Remember, your output is only as good as your input. Effective teamwork between affected organizational units and the WFM team commonly results in higher forecasting accuracy.

“What-if” Scenarios – For Rapid, Proactive Scheduling

“What-if” scenario tools offered by some WFM solutions are exceptionally useful for contact center managers. They allow planners to visualize what would happen to service levels before a planned event takes place. Planners can experiment with scenarios without risking operations in the contact center. These scenarios give answers to, for example, how the workload would be impacted should any of these occur:

Service hours were shifted, shortened, or extended;

A national TV campaign kicks off;

The service level was raised or lowered by a certain percentage;

A large number of untrained staff were to begin work simultaneously;

Yet another new media channel, such as chat, was introduced;

A major product with a rebate was offered.

Most operational headaches are the result of improper resourcing. Beyond the tactical, intraday management implications, scenario-planning is invaluable for long-term strategic planning. This is where many advanced WFM solutions are focusing today: helping contact center managers plan their long-term strategies in areas such as budgeting and agent recruiting. Rather than being reactionary, these scenarios equip contact center managers to anticipate workloads and resource the operation effectively before events occur.

Staffing – Getting the Right People for Each Type of Interaction

Staffing means ensuring the right agent headcount, ensuring the agent staff possesses the right skill sets, providing skills training if necessary, and establishing the right work rules. Proper staffing ensures adequate coverage for the next three to six months. If HR is involved in these areas, then close and continual collaboration with the contact center management is essential to WFM success.

Given that staff costs account for the majority of overall expenditure in most contact centers - more than the combined cost of telephony, technology, office premises, fittings, rent, and utilities - can you afford not to optimize your workforce? As for skills training, all agents need to have good 'soft' skills - active listening and empathy - basic IT skills, and a basic knowledge of the business. Importantly, the best agents do not want to be bored and they want a greater degree of empowerment.

The modern service operation requires more diverse, specific skills, and a higher level of skills to satisfy customers. These skills could include foreign language proficiency; specific product, customer and technical knowledge, and the ability to deal with multi-channel interactions. With the contact center industry expanding rapidly worldwide, recruiting and retaining top staff is a central issue and a priority for leading contact centers.

Skilled agents demand greater flexibility in work rules. Since contact centers tend to offer extended service hours, demands for flexible work rules are usually higher than those for a regularly scheduled nine-to-five day job. Work rules that interfere with agents' personal lives serve no one. Planners need to balance work rule demands in order to minimize unwanted, costly absences and staff attrition.

Planning staff according to call patterns and skill sets boosts service levels and improves first-call resolution. It makes the contact center a more enjoyable place to work. The bottom line? Accurately matching staff to call flow is essential in achieving workforce and cost efficiencies, in building brand loyalty and in reducing customer churn.

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Scheduling – Optimization Critical

The WFM team is solely entrusted with creating an effective work schedule, often covering the next four to twelve weeks. Manually forecasting the workload and matching it up with the right staff ratio is a complex, arduous, and labor-intensive task. In many contact centers today, these processes are still managed on spreadsheets.

Scheduling accuracy suffers if managers are unable to quickly respond to a range of variables, including:

Continual absences, holidays, vacation times;

Multi-channel interactions causing a change in flow patterns;

Skill levels – i.e., foreign language proficiency, product knowledge and soft skills, like active listening and empathy

Scheduling time for the associated skills training;

Staff work-time preferences;

Scheduling for a multi-site contact center.

Accuracy suffers, leading inevitably to under- or over-staffing, which is detrimental to customers and staff, and it drains your organization financially. In light of the ever-growing complexity of multi-channel interactions and multi- skill requirements, even customer service centers with fewer than 100 seats will benefit greatly from an automated WFM solution.

Sub-par forecasting and scheduling results in over- and under-staffing and inconsistent customer service levels. Schedules need to adjust to account for peaks and valleys during the day, week, or month.

AI-driven WFM solutions precisely, conveniently, and rapidly match up agent skill sets to customer needs while taking agent work-time preferences into account.

Once the scheduling is complete it doesn’t mean planners have reached job-done. As part of a cycle, scheduling affects the other processes, highlighting the importance of continuous adaptation in the face of agent illness, meetings, or unanticipated events. Intraday management tools help team leaders take control of their day, making minute adjustments at any interval.

Agents are not at their most useful when waiting idly by the phone. Neither are they at their most productive when stressed or over-worked. Stress and boredom – the consequences of over-work and under-work – are the two primary reasons given for agents abandoning ship. In fact, agent absenteeism is running rampant (around nine percent) across industries and is increasing. Attrition is reaching alarming rates as well, and organizations are hit hard, paying a fortune to recruit and train replacements – not to mention the cost of covering losses before agents are fully competent.

This is where an AI-fueled WFM solution comes into play, creating automated, optimized schedules that cover queues consistently and smoothly.

Accurately calculating the long-term headcount and effectively scheduling the right agent at the right time cuts down tremendously on under- and over-staffing. Being able to honor the majority of staff work-time preferences and giving ample schedule notice heightens staff morale, lowers attrition rates, and produces overall improvements in the quantity and quality of customer interactions.

With an automated WFM solution in place contact center managers can optimize their most valuable and most expensive resource: the agent staff.

Shortcomings of Spreadsheets & Erlang C Tables

Contact center managers of single, voice-only operations can still rely on experience, a spreadsheet, and a set of Erlang C tables to plan staff schedules. Invented by a Dane in 1917, Erlang C tables are calculations based on the number of agents needed in a contact center with a given number of calls per hour, a given average length of a call, and an acceptable level of delay in answering the call.

Spreadsheets, though, are hard-pressed to meet the challenges of a modern contact center. They can only assume a steady call rate and a zero abandonment rate; they frequently result in overstaffing; they only take single-skilled “standard” agents into account; they cannot consider priority-call schemes nor all-segmentation strategies, nor can they be applied when scheduling for multi- channel (e.g., e-mail, text, and chat) interactions.

Schedule Adherence

Adherence, a critical concept in WFM, basically means measuring the extent to which agents stick to the schedule.

The level of adherence is one of the most telling key performance indicators, and a real-time adherence tool allows you to see exactly what is happening, alerts you to deviations from the expected activity, and enables you to make changes before problems occur. Put simply, the more you use it, the more accurate your forecasts and schedules become.

Average handling time is the other key KPI that must be monitored two-dimensionally, by operations. AHT includes After Call Work (ACW), which is the time the agent does not spend interacting with the customer in real-time; instead, they're working on related administrative tasks, such as e-mailing or scanning docs.

Organizations should look for a solution that is simple to understand so staff will feel at ease using it, yet make sure it retains the power and functionality to help their contact center manager understand what has happened or not happened, with the ability to make any necessary changes quickly.

WFM Solutions – Who Are They Best Suited For?

Who needs WFM software? Customer service-focused contact centers of virtually any size across a wide range of industries, from financial services, healthcare, travel, hospitality and telecom to utilities and retail.

What challenges or goals are inciting them to turn to a WFM solution for help?

Heightened complexity due to multi-channel contact and multi-skill agents;
Need to decrease employee attrition and raise contact center standards;
Need for competitiveness with enhanced customer service as a competitive differentiator;
Higher service levels to impact customer loyalty, prevent customer churn, and increase revenue-making opportunities.

Nowadays, smaller contact centers have the luxury of being able to select among easier-to-use, cost- efficient, Cloud-based solutions that require less training but still offer the functionalities that raise the bar on contact center efficiency and effectiveness.

“In view of the growing complexity experienced in contact centers – impacted, for example, by multi- channel interactions and multi-skill requirements even customer-service operations with fewer than 100 seats may benefit greatly from a WFM solution.”

Return on Investment (ROI): Where and When? While many organizations utilizing WFM solutions may “feel” they’ve become more efficient, the majority are unable to “prove” it. From the outset, before implementing a WFM system, sit down with the WFM solution provider to determine clear, measurable ROI objectives, such as:

Decreased costs through a reduction in over-staffing;

Revenue-building through a reduction of understaffing;

Enhanced agent productivity by more accurately matching agent skills to the task at hand;

Reduced management costs due to rapid, automated scheduling;

Lower administrative costs by automating processes e.g., time-off requests;

Improved productivity with time over to identify skills shortages/arranging for suitable training;

Enhanced staff morale, diminished attrition, and the associated recruitment & training costs;

Reduced costs and increased revenue by effectively handling new multi-channel in advance;

Handling unanticipated situations rapidly and effectively as “what-if” scenarios have created best practices;

Better service levels, with a decrease in call queuing and abandonment as proof;

More satisfied customers, stronger loyalty, and greater receptiveness to cross- and up-selling.

Tips: Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Get buy-in from those that the solution will affect the most: agents. They may fear big brother is keeping closer tabs on them. Point out the benefits to be gained: fairer distribution of work, the empowering aspects of, for example, requesting specific shifts and holidays, and sensible traffic handling during peak periods.
Successful implementation requires that functional groups, such as IT, telephony, and HR talk with each other to understand one another’s targets.
Successfully implementing a WFM solution means organizations need to have a clear view of how their processes work; where and when they need to be changed. Sometimes implementing a WFM solution reveals limitations or gaps in existing processes.
The WFM tool is an application; not the full answer to one’s problems. It can’t do the planning on its own; the initial work still needs to be done: the better the input, the better the output. This, in turn, will successively reduce the amount of necessary fine- tuning.
WFM isn’t just about buying software; it is an operational philosophy about change and optimization. This is where the real value can be found. The road to success is rarely a straight line. Be realistic about the time required before reaping the full benefits and rewards of fine-tuning.
In the early stages of implementing multi-channel interaction or multi-skill training, factor in extra time so that agents have time to adapt. Time per transaction and training session successively decreases as familiarity and know-how increases.
A proper amount of continuous training is essential, as is reinforcement and testing of the training outcome at intervals. Workforce management systems are usually very feature-rich; it would be a shame if only a small percentage of what has been paid for is used – simply because training was broken off too early.

Call Center Workforce Management Guide