Workforce Management is much more than a mere operational strategy—it’s the fundamental pillar that ensures agent efficiency and the smooth operation of customer contact centers. Tackling the challenges of fluctuating demand, accurate forecasting, and agile human resource management requires a deep understanding of WFM.
What is WFM?
WFM (Workforce Management) is a four-phase improvement process: forecasting, planning, intra-day analysis, and revision. The primary goal of WFM is to assign the right resources to the right place at the right time, at an optimal cost to manage all company activities.
What is the added value?
Workforce Management is more than just schedule management. The goal is to operate the contact center optimally to achieve a targeted service level. Operations and staffing are optimized to reduce costs.
First Step: The “Buy-In” Process
The “Buy-In” must absolutely come from upper management. The management of an organization hires a team of WFM specialists and sets its expectations for the desired service level. This service level should be accompanied by a budget evaluation and a feasibility assessment at the organizational level. Indeed, the organization must assess whether it has enough agents to meet its desired service level. Open dialogue from management is therefore essential to set clear objectives and communicate them to the Workforce Management team.
Second Step: How to Choose the Right Scheduling Tool?
The choice of tool depends on multiple factors: the desired service level, the existing telephony platform, or the size of the company or contact center. Since we are addressing contact centers of various sizes, the choice becomes very broad. These different factors will determine whether an organization should issue a call for tenders for a WFM solution. For example, an organization with fewer than 20 agents in its contact center can manage without a WFM solution, using tools like Excel or various online tools. However, the choice of a Workforce Management solution is often tied to the team the organization hires, which can limit the appropriate solutions for the organization.
Third Step: Implementation
Once the “Buy-In” is completed and the appropriate solution is chosen, the implementation process becomes key to realizing the potential gains from workforce management. The first step in implementation is a complete review of the current configuration of the contact center. Some pre-established configurations in contact centers can hinder WFM forecasting, especially if they are not part of an integrated module. For example, Bull’s Eye Routing can hinder WFM optimization when it is not part of an integrated platform.
After the basic configuration, the WFM team must analyze a lot of data to make accurate forecasts about call volume and distribution. WFM solutions rely on trends and analyses of large volumes of data. The more data analyzed, the more accurate the forecasts become. Artificial intelligence helps establish trends.
Fourth Step: Operation
Today, WFM software offers the ability to generate schedules for several weeks at a time. The WFM solution looks at the last six weeks to make its forecasts. It is essential to be in contact with other departments to make accurate forecasts, as all departments can impact the number of incoming calls. For example, during the launch of a new product, the WFM team must be informed to forecast the number of agents accordingly.
Workforce Management software also considers the historical performance of agents. The WFM team must then use its market knowledge to adjust. Sometimes, forecasting software can create peaks of interactions followed by valleys. In other words, the software schedules a large number of agents for a given period, followed by very few agents. The Workforce Management team must smooth out the agent distribution to avoid pronounced trends.
In the operational phase, the WFM team is crucial, as it must constantly use its market knowledge to adjust the forecasts made by the software and ensure the best use of Workforce Management.
And what about artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence helps achieve better raw results, whether for forecasting, planning, or intra-day analysis. However, it adds notable value at the intra-day analysis level. Indeed, once forecasting and planning are done, the day comes when the WFM team observes and analyzes the intra-day grid. Artificial intelligence is now crucial for speeding up this process and minimizing human error. It helps draw conclusions quickly regarding intra-day grids.