There are four cornerstone disciplines of contact center workforce management (WFM): forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and review.
The review piece of the WFM puzzle is relatively simple: retrospectively evaluate the success of forecasts, schedules, and intraday strategies to isolate improvement opportunities.
Yet, there’s much more to the other elements, and resource planners are constantly looking for new ways to hone their WFM plans.
This month’s CX Today roundtable offers several best practices as inspiration, with expert contributors from leading WFM vendors.
Each of these vendors put forward the following four spokespeople to participate:
- Sam Peters, Head of Customer Success at Assembled
- Scott Budding, Manager of Sales Engineering at Calabrio
- Mitch Todd, Product Marketing Manager at NICE
- Trudy Cannon, Senior Director of GTM Strategy & Workforce Engagement at Verint
Below, each expert shares an “unexpected” best practice for contact center forecasting, scheduling, and intraday management in this WFM bonanza.
Contact Center Forecasting: Best Practices
Stop Thinking About Cases as Cases, Think About Them as Tasks or Segments
Peters: For complex case work that gets transferred or escalated, it’s impossible to develop an accurate forecast when you’re measuring the case as a whole. A case is the sum of its parts.
If you’re managing chat, email, or other async channels, you need to stop thinking about the world in “case or ticket ID.”
Instead, forecast on the segment-level (units of work) data — like the individual time spent on a certain task — rather than the entire case. This helps staff more accurately for multi-touch cases, expose bottlenecks, and set more accurate segment-level goals.
Speaking of cost-to-serve, this philosophy is especially helpful if your tickets get transferred or escalated to tiers managed by agents with different pay grades.
Forecast Contacts In the Reporting Periods They Start, Not End
Todd: Traditional WFM methods no longer cut it in the digital age. Workforce managers now must be able to take into account voice and digital, asynchronous, and synchronous interactions. They can do this with a modern WFM system using advanced analytics.
With such an analytics system, they can calculate the exact time invested in handling a digital interaction based on when the activity occurred rather than when it ended.
That information is essential since today’s WFM reality involves work items handled over multiple time intervals by numerous people, working on several items concurrently.
With a modern WFM system using advanced analytics, workforce managers can predict work volume and staffing requirements for omnichannel operations where employees move between calls, digital channels, and back-office operations. This leads to much more efficient CX operations.
Apply Analytics and Predictive Modelling Techniques
Budding: By harnessing advanced analytics and predictive modeling techniques, forecasters can evaluate historical data and market trends to determine demand with greater accuracy.
In doing so, they may ensure that service levels match perfectly with demand and create reliable schedules that place the right agents with the right skills at the right time.
As such, contact centers can maintain high-quality service during periods of high demand and continually optimize labor efficiency.
Consider New Trends In Customer Behavior
Cannon:
Today’s forecasting metrics must track social and digital channels such as chat, messaging, and email while gauging when a customer will transition from digital to a live agent for the answers they need.
As such, leaders must be able to forecast these trends and changes in customer behavior.
AI and the latest algorithms can help find the correlation between these interactions while surfacing insights and understanding supervisors’ need to better forecast workloads.
By integrating AI into the “tried-and-true” practice of better understanding customer behaviors, a new-school approach to forecasting emerges.
Contact Center Scheduling: Best Practices
Schedule at 15-Minute Intervals
Peters: Scheduling at 15-minute intervals (vs. 30-minute or 60-minute) can improve service levels by up to ten percent, according to Assembled data.
Meanwhile, the introduction of shorter forecasting intervals adds greater flexibility to staff schedules, increasing agent happiness.
Increase Forecast Accuracy, Offer More Shift Flex., & Pre-Plan Wellness Breaks
Cannon: The new-school scheduling best practice is based on several factors. First, if there are significant variances in forecasting accuracy, then scheduling will surely be off. Having a forecasting best practice in place should be a new-school scheduling best practice.
Second, companies should deploy flexible scheduling capabilities that empower agents to manage their schedules. Contact center operations should mirror the gig worker and offer more flexibility in shift type and length.
Furthermore, we can see unproductive time increase when agents are busy, resulting in agents creating their own breaks through after-call work or idle time. Since these “breaks” become inevitable, supervisors can improve productivity by pre-planning five minutes of wellness time. This autonomy provides better opportunities for balancing work and life.
Employee wellness is critical to providing exceptional customer experiences. Therefore, best practices for scheduling must evolve to better accommodate every agent’s work-life balance.
Embrace Self-Scheduling (Part 1)
Todd: Organizations can now enable employees to self-schedule, giving them greater autonomy over their schedules and encouraging coordination between team members.
Not only does this boost morale and lower attrition, but it can also be particularly useful during peaks in interaction volumes.
After all, during unexpected spikes in volume, organizations can push out notifications to employees, asking them to pick up shifts to fill staffing gaps.
Using a mobile app in addition to self-scheduling makes this process seamless.
Self-scheduling also eliminates any perceived favoritism that can arise when workforce managers manually schedule their employees.
Lastly, by instituting flexible scheduling, organizations enable employees to define their own work-life balance.
Embrace Self-Scheduling (Part 2)
Budding: Contact centers typically notice a significant improvement in their core WFM metrics when they embrace self-scheduling.
Available within many modern WFM systems, self-scheduling allows agents to move their breaks and lunches, add extra time, or take time off various calls and tasks.
Across many operations, this strategy has improved adherence rates, minimized agent attrition, and enabled contact centers to enhance their service level accuracy.
Additionally, agents feel empowered and in control of their work, which helps to boost their job satisfaction and motivation.
Contact Center Intraday Management: Best Practices
Make Adherence and Performance Data Available to Agents
Peters:
What can be measured can be improved, and Assembled data suggests that agents who can view and monitor their own adherence improve by 12-15 percent in the first 30 days.
There’s also a second benefit: greater agent empowerment! After all, agents can understand their performance in real-time and make improvements.
Moreover, when offering agents flexible scheduling or paid time off (PTO) requests, educate them in reading a forecast and staffing heatmaps so they know how to choose time off that won’t leave their fellow agents under-resourced.
By teaching agents how to interpret their performance metrics, WFM teams can encourage a culture of accountability.
Create an Automated Process for Agent Absenteeism
Todd: When an employee calls out of work unexpectedly, next-gen WFM systems can instantly forecast net staffing shortages and target resulting shift openings to agents most likely to opt in based on their self-selected preferences.
Such a tactic avoids overtime and fills staffing gaps quickly, specifically when planners must fill shifts on the day of.
Also, it removes perceived bias when asking employees to fill in during times of need. After all, it’s all automated, with WFM systems able to extend shift openings to employees most likely to accept based on the data. That gives employees more control over scheduling while ensuring WFM teams meet their staffing needs.
Go All-In on Data-Driven Decision-Making
Budding: By closely monitoring and analyzing data available to us, organizations can identify whether their contact center is under or over-performing compared to its forecast. This allows them to make informed and data-driven decisions that improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary costs.
However, while the data is important, planners must analyze it within the right context. It is crucial to understand the reasons for these trends before taking action.
For example, is a quiet morning reflective of a calm day so that we can send some agents home early, or should we expect demand to ramp up in the afternoon?
By looking at the whole picture, supported by data, organizations can adapt their resources to ensure maximum efficiency.
Get Smarter on Managing Real-Time Schedule Adherence
Cannon: Challenges arise when employee adherence goals are higher than are realistic. For instance, if an agent must adhere to their schedule 95 percent of the time, they may cut short calls or adjust their schedule to hit that 95 percent mark, reducing productivity.
As a result, when adherence goals are too high, supervisors often end up fixing issues rather than managing adherence.
To circumvent this issue, managers may use intraday tools to manage outlier behaviors instead of enforcing targets.
As such, agents can be more efficient without rushing customer interactions, improving overall CX.
Meanwhile, supervisors may leverage data and trends to calculate and monitor more reasonable adherence goals.
Miss out on our previous CX Today roundtable? Catch up here: Agent Assist: Use Cases, Benefits, & Providers
