WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT
Do We Have Enough Agents Here?
Workforce Management in a contact center is the art and science of having the correct number of employees with the right skills at the right time, to meet accurately forecasted volumes of work while maintaining a predetermined service level.
Workforce Management is a critical function for contact centers. Poor planning and execution will harm the business in terms of cost, customer satisfaction, employee burnout, and motivation.
Workforce management software available in today’s marketplace can quite effectively manage this task and has dramatically improved function, capability, and price. There is no reason to use spreadsheets and whiteboards in today’s contact center!
What does Workforce Management software do? Workforce management (WFM) is an integrated set of processes that an institution uses to optimize the productivity of its employees on individual, departmental, and entity-wide levels. Here are the functions of workforce management.
Calculation of an Accurate Forecast
— Collect call history data
— Identify call patterns (day, week, season, etc.)
— Identify unique day patterns (holidays, etc.)
— Identify other event or business drivers that might impact call volume/pattern
Tracking and Reporting
— Measuring and adjusting
— Analyze daily/weekly reports
— Investigate causes for under-performance
— Apply findings into workforce management process
Calculation of Staffing Requirements and Scheduling
— Define Service level, ASA, and average handle time
— Calculate workload
— Define staffing requirements
— Include all activities (call and non-call) into schedule
— Build flexibility (start/end times, breaks, multi-skill, etc.)
— Create schedule for 15 or 30-minute increments
Monitoring, Managing Adherence and Managing Exceptions
— Inform and educate about the importance and impact of adherence
— Measure and manage adherence throughout the day (real-time adherence)
— Provide incentives
— Changes in call volume or arrival pattern
— Staffing or scheduling issues
— Business related exceptions
INDUSTRY SERVICE TIPS
1. With the integration of the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) and Workforce Management, data collection is faster, enabling more accurate forecasting, real-time monitoring of adherence, and intra-day management of call centers.
2. Plan the schedule using smaller 15-minute intervals instead of 30-minute intervals.
NEXT STEPS
You can see from these four steps that spreadsheets and whiteboards can’t possibly be effective. It is amazing how many organizations still employ a manual approach to workforce management. By relying on paper spreadsheets, they lack a way to accurately measure the degree of adherence to the schedule. Reporting, if done at all, is a nightmare. The end product is too much time and effort spent managing staff for little return. Workforce Management software helps organizations to automate key tasks that have an immediate impact on the bottom line through more accurate call volume forecasts, optimized scheduling and daily performance tracking in real-time.