Contact Center Workforce Management (WFM): 3 Best Practices from Florida Blue

Check out the highlights from WFM Director Matt Robertson’s session at Customer Contact Week Nashville 2024

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Contact Center Workforce Management (WFM): 3 Best Practices from Florida Blue
Workforce Engagement ManagementInsights

Published: October 28, 2024

Charlie Mitchell

Florida Blue’s contact center operations include 4,000 global agents handling queries across multiple lines of business.

Those lines of business include medical insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield, support for the Florida Blue Foundation, and partnerships with state and federal government programs.

The organization manages all this through a mix of U.S.-based, offshore, and nearshore agents, predominantly via voice support but also through email, chat, and fax.

As such, its workforce management (WFM) team spins several plates and – over the years – has picked up many best practices.

Matt Robertson, Director of Workforce Management & Operations Analytics at Florida Blue, shared lots of these during his session at Customer Contact Week (CCW) Nashville 2024.

Here are three standout examples that seemed to resonate most.

1. Develop an Impact Assessment for System Outages

As tech use increases across the contact center, so does the probability of breakdowns.

These extend beyond the core contact center solution. Everything from IVR and web outages to CRM failures can cause chaos for resource planners.

As such, Florida Blue takes a systematic approach to help quantify these effects. “This enables us to communicate with executives and IT on the potential cost of these incidents and plan for future issues,” said Robertson.

The approach consists of three critical steps. First, the WFM team determines which metrics tech outages impact most.

Examples include contact volumes, average handling time, service levels, various customer experience KPIs, and potential revenue loss.

Next, the WFM team must establish relationships with IT and reporting teams, ensuring it has access to the appropriate data to track these critical metrics from when an outage starts until it ends.

That’s critical, as even brief breakdowns can have prolonged effects on contact center operations.

Finally, the team may quantify the impact of various failures by developing a process to capture data systematically, likely using databases and spreadsheets.

By implementing such a system, the contact center can assess metrics – like handling time deviations – during incidents to estimate their impact, create standard operating procedures, and improve its response to future failures.

2. Establish a “What Went Wrong” Framework for Unexpected Contact Drivers

In contact centers, unexpected deviations from the plan are common and often stem from a few predictable drivers.

Florida Blue builds these into a “What Went Wrong” framework.

Unexpected contact volumes, longer handle times, staffing shortfalls, absenteeism, voluntary time off (VTO), scheduling discrepancies, unplanned staffing changes… these are just some examples of such drivers.

“By categorizing these drivers, analysts can systematically quantify impacts,” added Robertson. “We often convert impacts into FTEs (full-time equivalents) to simplify analysis.

Analyzing impacts in FTE terms allows us to see the net effect of factors like increased absenteeism or call volume surges.

Additionally, this What Went Wrong framework offers a clear-cut view of the root causes behind operational issues and helps refine future planning.

3. Take a Dynamic Approach to Tracking Forecast Accuracy

WFM teams often aspire to hit broad targets for forecast accuracy, aiming to get within five to ten percent of actual volumes.

Yet, Florida Blue takes a dynamic target-setting approach based on historical volatility and discrepancies between forecasting models.

“We update performance targets semiannually, adjusting them based on business volatility,” noted Robertson. “This helps provide clear expectations for forecasting accuracy and communicates a realistic range of variability to stakeholders.”

Moreover, Robertson revealed that Florida Blue utilizes a tool called “Shiny for R”, which tracks and visualizes the performance of the various forecasting models it harnesses.

With this, the team can view the previous days’ performance, forecast accuracy, and volatility trends across different lines of business, enabling rapid iteration as business needs change.

At CCW 2024, CX Today produced much more content with several other insightful customer experience practitioners. Here are three more excellent examples:

 

Workforce ManagementWorkforce Optimization
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