By Bill Durr, Principal Global Solutions Consultant, Verint® Witness Actionable Solutions®
For years, workforce management (WFM) has been synonymous with contact center forecasting, scheduling, and adherence. However, today’s WFM solutions are capable of providing far more insight and business value—not just in the contact center, but in other areas of the enterprise as well.
Moving from Tactical to Strategic with Holistic WFM
Typically, WFM equates to ensuring that the right agents, with the right skills, are available at the right times. The process is very tactical, with a short-term focus on deploying daily or weekly schedules.
Holistic WFM goes beyond forecasting and scheduling. It enables executive management to evaluate different staffing options supporting changing business requirements, gain greater visibility into operations, and find a better balance among cost, revenue, employee satisfaction, and customer service. This closed-loop process begins with strategic planning, continues with the tactical components of forecasting and scheduling, followed by real-time intra-day management. The management loop is closed by the inclusion of individual agent scorecards that show how agents are performing against their adherence goals each day. Let’s take a closer look.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning looks 12 to 18 months ahead to create an operational model of the center. It leverages historical call queues and other data to create monthly or weekly high-level forecasts of demand reflecting seasonality and prevailing trends. This enables contact centers to model their operations and experiment with variables to understand “what if” scenarios for producing better customer experiences at a lower cost.
Forecasting and Scheduling
Once the long-term plan is in place, tactical forecasting looks ahead one to six weeks to ensure that the labor deployment curve (individual agent schedules) closely matches the forecasted demand curve. Once demand forecasts are set, proficiency-based scheduling is used to align the workforce with the workload.
Intra-Day Management
Intra-day management consists of a set of tools that compares the work plan with what is actually occurring in the contact center. Managers can view forecasted vs. actual demand throughout the day and track individual agent adherence to their schedules—then take the appropriate actions to meet service-level projections or adherence goals.
Performance Management
The ultimate goal of WFM is for agents to follow their schedules, helping contact centers meet their service-level objectives. Performance management tools help by providing agents with their current performance in a same skill-group context, along with the established goal. Placing key performance indicators (KPIs) on agent scorecards can prompt agents to focus on the behaviors behind the KPIs, while daily feedback can help motivate them to meet and exceed their goals.
WFM and At-Home Agents
Although at-home agents have become part of the contact center landscape, more organizations are now deploying them. Some are embracing what could be called “seldom-see” and “never-see” work-at-home business models. In the “seldom-see” model, the agent spends only one or two days per month in the physical contact center. In “never-see” models, the agent works exclusively from home.
Other centers are moving away from an employee model toward a contractor model. In these work-at-home business models, the agents are sometimes required to purchase their own equipment according to company specifications.
While any work-at-home approach is likely to impose some additional technology costs, the movement toward home agents is largely driven by the total potential cost savings available and related operational advantages. Today’s WFM solutions offer many cost-effective features to support the home-based agent model, such as browser-based functionality for publishing schedules and monitoring adherence, agent self-service options (including shift bidding and swapping), daily scorecard updates, email and screen pop-ups, and integrated eLearning and coaching.
The Back Office: WFM’s Next Frontier
The movement of WFM into the “back office” presents another dramatic change. Managing back-office operations—such as order processing and claims management—differs significantly from contact center work, in part because there is no ACD to provide a source of data.
Back-office work frequently involves workflow from one employee to another and batch-processing work that arrives in bulk at preset times. WFM software has evolved accordingly. In addition to modifications to the forecasting and scheduling algorithms, a small applet residing inside the operating system on each employee’s PC is used to monitor and track how the workstation is used, including the applications accessed and length of time spent on each screen. This data stream mimics the data supplied by an ACD and can enable supervisors to manage schedule adherence and individual employee performance.
Choosing a WFM Solution
The capabilities of WFM solutions can vary widely. Verint Witness Actionable Solutions’ Impact 360® Workforce Management is an example of a WFM solution that can enable contact centers (including home agent deployments), branch offices, and back-office operations to reduce costs by staffing appropriately to meet their workload while enhancing employee effectiveness and retention.
Impact 360 Workforce Management is part of the Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite, which also includes solutions for quality monitoring and recording, performance management, speech analytics, data analytics, customer feedback surveys, and eLearning and coaching. Separately, these individual solutions have value in customer service operations. But when deployed together under a unified framework, they offer analytics-driven workforce optimization—an effective way to help reduce costs while improving enterprise performance, competitive advantage, and the overall customer experience.