Optimizing Resources, Satisfying Customers

The phrase 'workforce management (WFM) solution' describes management software tools designed to improve the efficiency of contact centers. A WFM solution lays the groundwork for delivering superior customer interactions. It helps planners schedule the right agent with the right skill set to the right queue at the best time to meet customer demand.

As any scheduler will confirm, reaching these goals is challenging. It involves balancing a variety of operational challenges and stakeholder interests, including those of customers, agents, and managers. This task becomes even more complex for those relying on manual, Excel spreadsheet-based processes.

Artificial intelligence and automation, when integrated with WFM software, greatly improve operational efficiency and employee engagement. These technologies automate forecasting and scheduling, and they enhance agent performance management and adherence monitoring.

As multi-channel interactions continue to expand and the demand for multi-skilled, geographically distributed agents rises, planners today encounter challenges of unprecedented complexity. Significant efficiency gains and improvements in customer satisfaction are certainly within reach, with WFM software playing a pivotal role.

Click Here to Learn Specifics About Eleveo's WFM Tool

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

Workforce management tools must accurately forecast demand. They have to predict the call, email, and chat volumes throughout the day, week, month, or season. Sometimes, they need to predict volume a minute-by-minute basis. Your WFM software should then align staffing needs with this demand.

Forecasting serves as the cornerstone. Effective predictions necessitate input: historical data on handling times, arrival trends, shrinkage, efficiency, and similar factors. This means departments, like marketing, must share insights from their experiences and upcoming promotional strategies. The contact center planner can then establish targets, assess results, identify trends, and anticipate changes.

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.

Employee Scheduling – 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.

Creating schedules 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.

Click Here for Specifics on Eleveo's Advanced Scheduling Tools.

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.

Sub-par accuracy leads 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.

AI-driven WFM solutions precisely, conveniently, and rapidly matches agent skill sets to customer needs while taking agent work-time preferences into account. Intraday management tools help team leaders take control of their day, making minute adjustments at any interval.

Stress and boredom – the consequences of over-work and under-work – are the two primary reasons given for agent attrition. In fact, agent absenteeism is running rampant (around nine percent) across industries and is increasing.

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.

Honoring 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

Spreadsheets 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.

Workforce Management Solutions – Who Are They Best Suited For?

Who needs a Workforce Management Solution? 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 Workforce Management 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 Workforce Management Solution 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 software is 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