Workforce management (WFM) is a critical part of running a contact center, with WFM teams taking on a series of tasks to optimize staffing levels. In doing so, they ensure cost efficiency, protect customers from wait times, and ensure that agent workloads are not overwhelming.
Consequently, WFM plays a significant role in ensuring the right business, customer, and agent outcomes. For this reason, workforce management is a dedicated module in most CCaaS solutions, and skilled WFM planners are in high demand.
A Definition of Workforce Management for the Contact Center
Workforce management (WFM) is the art of forecasting contact volumes, scheduling agents, and making real-time decisions to optimize service level and occupancy targets.
Planners will track the performance of historical metrics – such as forecast accuracy and schedule efficiency – to measure the effectiveness of their plans. In doing so, they may tweak forecasting algorithms, shift patterns, and real-time reporting to steadily optimize staffing calculations.
The Components of Workforce Management
To meet critical customer, agent, and business outcomes, WFM planners continually look to improve each of the following four elements of their strategy.
1. Demand Forecasting
By accurately predicting the number of contacts that the call center will receive, planners can ensure that they have the optimal number of staff in place at all times.
To do this, organizations must predict the volume of interactions they can expect across the day – which planners typically break down into 15 or 30-minute reporting periods.
Through analyzing trends in historical contact volumes and factoring in seasonality, contact centers may use many techniques to create forecasts. These can become quite complex. However, many WFM systems contain algorithms that automate these processes.
Testing the effectiveness of these algorithms on historical data, contact centers can uncover which is best suited to their environment. Experimenting to see which best forecasts during peak periods and “what if” scenarios is also an excellent practice.
2. Workforce Scheduling and Shift Design
Now understanding the forecasted demand across different intervals, planners map out staff schedules to meet the demand.
Traditionally, planners use an Erlang C calculator to calculate how many agents are necessary. Simply entering the forecasted demand, length of the reporting period, and average handling time into the calculator will enable a contact center to determine its ideal staffing requirement to meet its desired service level and occupancy rate.
However, thanks to the rise of better scheduling algorithms within WFM systems, there are now better ways to make staffing calculations.
With staffing requirements across the day, contact centers can start scheduling agents. Creating new shift patterns – which meet agent preferences – will likely enhance schedule efficiency. Casual-, split-, and micro-shifts are excellent examples.
3. Intraday Management
While forecasts and schedules are usually created and reviewed in the months and weeks before, intraday management is the real-time act of tweaking schedules against actual volumes. Doing so is often crucial, as 100% forecast accuracy is virtually impossible to achieve, no matter how sophisticated the technique.
Alongside unexpected spikes in call volumes, high absenteeism and system downtime may also impede the effectiveness of schedules. These incidences also highlight the value of intraday management.
Workforce managers must have standard operating procedures (SOPs) to meet these challenges head-on. For instance, they may train and draft in a section of the support team in both inbound and outbound operations so that agents can switch between tasks to make up for any unpredicted shortfall.
4. Review
If yesterday’s service levels or occupancy rates were too high, it is critical to review what happened. Doing so may provide insights that will enhance WFM planning in the future.
A classic example is marketing launching a promotion without any prior warning. Such an occurrence will likely cause an unexpected spike in demand that puts the contact center on the back foot.
Yet, it is also best practice to review what caused low contact volumes. By deciphering this, the WFM team can cut costs – which is likely to be music to the ears of contact center managers.
Benefits of Workforce Management
By investing in the workforce management function, organizations can gain from:
- Better customer experiences – Lowering wait times means that customers receive the answers they desire much more quickly, reducing effort.
- Employee engagement – By optimizing their workload and meeting schedule preferences, WFM teams can bolster engagement rates.
- Lower employee turnover – By keeping occupancy rates to a minimum, contact centers can better manage agent workloads and avoid burnout.
- Higher savings – Through enhancing staffing calculations, WFM ensures that the contact center is rarely overstaffed, which is often a prominent source of unnecessary cost.
- Added revenue generation – Optimal staffing availability means that the contact center safeguards service levels, lowering abandon rates and the chances that customers lose faith in the business.
Wish to increase the perception of WFM in the contact center? Check out our article: Putting WFM at the Heart of the Contact Centre
