Efficient and effective workforce management (WFM) is a challenge for every organization. In the contact center, the challenge is even greater: Volatile contact volumes, fluctuating availability of staff and unplanned events add extra layers of complexity that make contact center workforce management more difficult - and more interesting.
What is workforce management, anyway?
“WFM is about having the right number of people in the right places at the right times, doing the right things.”
– Source: Brad Cleveland
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But if you read the sentence carefully, you can see that there are four dimensions to workforce management:
- The quantitative dimension
- The qualitative dimension
- The spatial dimension
- The time dimension
Let’s explore those dimensions one-by-one.
Workforce management in the call center: the quantitative dimension
When we talk about quantity in this context, we are obviously talking about the number of agents you need to handle the contact volume. But the contact volume isn’t fixed. It increases and decreases throughout the day, across the week, and with the seasons. In addition, it is affected by external factors like marketing events or the weather. Average handling time (AHT) is also not a constant. That is what makes the task of always planning the right number of contact center agents so challenging.
Even if you do your job perfectly, there may be situations in which you still have too few agents logged in. This has a negative impact on customer satisfaction and service level. Having too many agents logged in is just as bad. It means you’re wasting precious resources.
Workforce management in the call center: the qualitative dimension
WFM isn’t just about the number of agents. Not all customer queries are the same. Some require product knowledge. Others require sales skills. Others require knowledge of specific processes such as billing. And written communication (e.g. email) requires different skills to spoken communication (e.g. calls). You don't just need to have the right number of agents planned. You need to have agents with the right skills to handle the diverse range of customer queries. This is what we mean when we talk about the qualitative dimension.
In practice, agents rarely have just one skill. A single agent may be skilled in sales and service for multiple products, via different channels. That agent would be a multi-skilled agent. All else being equal, multi-skilling increases efficiency. It means that more contacts can be handled by fewer agents. But it also makes your job as a planner a bit more challenging. You can find some tips on that topic in this popular blog post.
Workforce management in the call center: the spatial dimension
When we hear the term ‘spatial dimension’, the first thing we probably think of is ‘place of work’ - and that isn’t completely wrong. Larger contact centers typically operate on multiple sites, even in multiple countries. However, in recent years, and particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘spatial dimension’ often refers to whether agents physically work in the contact center or at home.
Covid taught us that when the situation is managed properly, it doesn’t matter whether agents work from home or in the office. What matters is that they are available to handle customer contact when needed, and that they perform to the same high standard regardless of where they sit during the working day. It also matters that contacts are queued and routed to the right agents regardless of location, and that their adherence can be tracked no matter where they sit.
Workforce management in the call center: time dimension
Spoiler: this is nothing to do with time travel. When we talk about the time dimension, we are talking about the multiple time horizons that planners must have in mind when doing their job. It’s about building forecasts and creating schedules in each planning cycle. It's about ensuring that there are enough agents with the right qualifications servicing the right queue down to 15 or 30 -minute intervals. And it’s about long-term planning: How many staff will you need in 3 months? And how many staff should you budget for in the coming year?
Forecasting typically allows us to estimate short-term staffing requirements quite well. Forecasting can also be used for long-term planning, but long-term planning is also a function of strategic decisions that you have to work out together with the leadership team and your Operations colleagues.
Long-term and short-term planning
Let’s look at the two time horizons for contact center planning: long-term and short-term.
Long-term planning in the call center
As described above, when planning for the long term you typically look ahead for several months, possibly years. You can find advice on the pros and cons of different long-term planning horizons in this useful blog post.
In general, the process of long-term personnel planning in the call center can be divided into four steps.
1. Understand long-term business trends
The question here is how the organization wants to position itself in the next 6-12 months and beyond. What are the company’s goals? What growth rates are expected? What company expansions are planned? Are any new products or services being introduced? Or being retired? What macroeconomic trends could have an impact on the business? Are there new technologies whose use will significantly affect the number of staff that will be needed? Of course, you cannot take all possible external influences into account, but you can consider the strategic direction of the company.
The big picture is what is important here. Of course, the planner can’t do this alone. Close dialogue with corporate leadership, and departments such as marketing, sales, and product development is essential. This will enable you to understand your organization’s long-term business goals and incorporate them into your demand forecast.
2. Create a long-term demand forecast
In order to build a long-term demand forecast, the business outlook is important, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. You must still generate a forecast based on historical data. For long-term planning, the forecast needs to detect long-term growth and decline trends. It needs to identify seasonal peaks and valleys. And just as with short-term forecasting, you need to identify one-off events and anomalies and remove them from the forecast.
3. Create the capacity plan
As a colleague once said: “A forecast in itself has no value. The real magic happens in the planning”. He was mainly referring to scheduling agents in the short term, but the same is true for long-term capacity planning. Here, you must calculate the required number of FTEs (Full Time Equivalents) required. Just as with short-term planning, you must take into account shrinkage: inflate the staffing requirement number to allow for the fact that agents will take vacation, call in sick, and attend training courses. Don’t forget to include skills in your long-term capacity plan; sufficient agents with all the required skills need to be hired and trained. Your HR and training colleagues will need this information. And don’t forget that your long-term plan shouldn’t just cover employee requirements. There will be implications for infrastructure such as workstations, technology, and buildings.
4. Initiate the recruiting and training process
In most organizations, the HR team takes care of the hiring process, including training and onboarding. They will need your capacity plan to see how many agents with what qualifications are needed and take this into account as part of their annual planning process. They will also take into account the level of attrition in the contact center.
Short-term planning in the call center
Now that we have completed long-term planning, we can move on to the daily business of the planner: short-term workforce planning.
This process can also be divided into 4 steps, which form a positive feedback loop. Long-term staff planning can also be seen as part of this loop. However, we have decided against integrating it with this section in order to clarify the difference between long-term and short-term planning.
1. Forecasting
When you create your forecast for the coming period, you look at the historical data and use it to predict future demand. This process is similar in long-term and short-term demand planning.
However, in short-term planning, you don’t include strategic factors such as macroeconomic trends. You do need to factor in tactical business intelligence, e.g. marketing promotions, billing runs, or price changes.
Another difference is the level of detail of the forecast. In short-term planning, forecasts must be made at interval level. This is important for scheduling, which we will cover in the next step.
>> If you want to take a deep dive into the forecasting process, check out the Forecasting section of our What is WFM pages.
2. Scheduling
Once you’re happy with your forecast, it’s ready to use as input to the scheduling process. Scheduling is about building daily, weekly, and monthly shifts for your agents. At first glance, that doesn’t sound too difficult, but the devil is in the detail. Ideally, schedules will match the ‘supply’ of agents with customer ‘demand’ in every interval of your planning period. That’s tough when there are peaks and valleys in demand. But that’s not the end of the challenges.
You’ve also got to build shifts that comply with labor laws that dictate the maximum length of shift, the minimum rest period between shifts, and other constraints. And you’ve got to build shifts that comply with the employment contract of each individual agent. It’s no good scheduling a week with 40 hours of work to a part-timer who works 24 hours per week, for example. Scheduling is a balancing act, in which you need to optimize the balance between customer experience, agent experience, and business efficiency.
>> If you want to take a deep dive into the scheduling process, check out the Scheduling section of our What is WFM pages.
3. Intraday management
No matter how accurate your forecast is or how efficient your schedules are, things rarely go to plan when the day arrives. A sudden increase in call volume or unforeseen absences due to illness are common scenarios in every contact center. The contact center business is fast-moving and volatile, and that's exactly what makes it so interesting. So, what can you do if reality deviates from plan? This is where intraday management (sometimes called real-time management) comes into play. Its goal is to achieve service goals despite unexpected events.
Intraday management is about keeping an eye on the most important metrics as they develop during the day. Metrics to watch include forecast accuracy, service level, waiting time, and under/over coverage of staffing requirements. You should also keep track of your agents’ adherence to their schedules.
If you detect a deviation between forecast workload and actual workload, it’s good practice to re-forecast for the remainder of the day. Modern WFM applications such as injixo do this automatically using AI Machine Learning to constantly update the forecast with the most recent data. The revised forecast will help you and your team to decide whether to take action - and what measures should be taken.
Depending on whether there is an over- or under-coverage as a result of the unforeseen events, you will take different actions. If you find yourself understaffed, you could call upon employees from other areas, such as the back office. Or you could postpone planned training courses in order to have more agents available for customer contact.
>> If you want to take a deep dive into the intraday management process, check out the Intraday management section of our What is WFM pages.
4. Analysis
The final step of the process is to learn lessons from the current planning cycle and feed that knowledge into the next cycle. That’s why the WFM process is effectively a feedback loop that enables continuous improvement. For example, you should identify the underlying reasons why your forecast was inaccurate at certain times, and build that knowledge into your future forecasting as business intelligence. You should measure shrinkage, so you can build the correct level of shrinkage into your staffing calculation next time round. Adherence reports are a perfect tool for 1:1s between team leaders and agents, helping agents improve their schedule adherence over time.
Analysis is a way of measuring - and celebrating - planning performance. It also provides vital information to leadership and other stakeholders in the contact center.
>> If you want to take a deep dive into the analysis process, check out the Analytics section of our What is WFM pages.
Software makes your life easier
If nothing else, this post has hopefully revealed that contact center workforce management is a very demanding task. If you do this job for a living and you do it well, you deserve a pat on the back!
Some planners do make things more difficult for themselves than they need to be. Many planners struggle valiantly with spreadsheets, running forecasts and building schedules with lots of manual effort. Excel is a great general-purpose tool that most people use nowadays. It is possible to perform some WFM tasks using a spreadsheet, but the fact remains that eventually, it will simply fail to cope with the complexity. Is Excel past its use-by date in your contact center? Check out 8 Signs That You've Outgrown Excel for Workforce Planning.
The solution is professional WFM software, like injixo. This supports you across the entire WFM cycle and brings new capabilities to the table - supporting employee engagement, for example. You can find out here what workforce management software can do for you.
Conclusion
WFM is about having the right number of people in the right places at the right times, doing the right things.
Short-term planning usually gets most of the attention: forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, analysis, then repeat. But the long-term perspective is no less important. It provides the foundations on which short-term planning can be built. After all, if you simply don’t have sufficient employees because you didn’t start the hiring process early enough, you’re going to struggle to hit your planning goals - no matter how good you are at short-term planning.
At the end of the day, long-term planning and short-term planning are inextricably linked. If you don’t do a good job of both, you won’t be prepared for the turbulence typical of the industry. And by not using professional WFM software, you’re not only delivering a sub-optimal customer experience, failing to engage your agents, and missing out on efficiency gains. You’re making life harder for yourself.
In this recording of a highly-rated webibar, injixo's WFM consultants reveal proven methods for long-range forecasting and capacity planning that work regardless of the tool you use for WFM.
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