Workforce Management
Workforce management (WFM) is a term that encompasses all of the processes that a contact
centre undertakes in order to have the right number of staff with the right skills available at the
right time to meet demands.
Organizations use this technique to optimize productivity of its employees.
WFM strategies include:
Forecasting contact volumes
Scheduling staffs
Intra-day Management
Creating Business Continuity Plan (BCP).
Benefits of Effective WFM:
● Optimize staff planning
● Increase productivity
● Reduce labor costs
● And improve customer service.
WFM is a repeating process and consists of 5 interconnected steps:
Forecasting
Planning
Scheduling
Intra-day Management
Analytics
Forecasting
Forecasting is the first phase of the WFM process, as it is the method of estimating how much
contacts we will receive at a certain point in time.
It accurately predicts future metrics like volume or Average Handling Time (AHT) using
historical data or Business Intelligence.
It is a dynamic process with frequent updates. Workforce managers, responsible for forecasting,
may do long term forecasts for predicting the number of staff needs for hiring plans , frequently
update short term forecasts to help staff scheduling decisions.
In simple words, forecasting means finding a trend based on historic data upon which prediction
can be made for the future. Like, in which time interval we received more volume in the past, we
will assign more agents at that time.
Planning
Planning is also known as resource planning or capacity planning. It is the process of
determining how many workforce resources an organization needs today, tomorrow, and as
much as five years into the future.
Capacity planning allows leaders to determine the perfect mix of employees—based on their
specific skills, capabilities, and preferences—to perfectly handle customer needs.
At the job level, capacity planning ensures that the right talent is in the right job at the
right time.
At the company level, capacity planning ensures that the organization is neither
understaffed nor overstaffed.
At the strategic level, capacity planning identifies the gaps between the current and
future workforce (two to five years out), and takes steps to assure the desired quantity,
quality, cost of personnel are in place as the company advances.
Scheduling
Scheduling is a workforce management process to determine how many people you need to
schedule for a specific type of work at various times throughout the day.
It also involves defining schedules so that the transition from one shift to the other is seamless
and work remains uninterrupted.
It is an integral component of workforce management, which involves taking into account
predicted workloads and then the number of resources needed to complete the job. With dynamic
industries (as are most industries that hire hourly workers), the workload changes frequently, and
having an automated scheduling process in place to handle these changes is imperative.
Intraday Management
Contact center intraday management, often called ‘real-time management’, is the process of
monitoring how actual performance compares on the day with planned performance, then taking
swift corrective action.
RTA (Real Time Adherence) is workforce management metric that helps you pinpoint
employees that are currently out of adherence with the planned schedule. Real-time adherence
essentially shows you in real-time what an agent is scheduled to be doing, and what they are
actually doing. For example, if the agent is scheduled to be on the phone right now, but their
current state shows they are on break, then they are out of adherence. Adherence has a big
impact on the ability to hit SLAs.
Intraday managers are responsible for monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) on the day.
They then take appropriate action when one or more KPIs deviate from the target by more than a
threshold value. They are also typically responsible for managing ‘shrinkage events’ such as time
off and meetings in order to minimize the impact of these events on KPI achievement.
Intraday monitoring enables you to see the differences between what was originally forecast and
what actually occurs in real time for the current day.
Analytics
Even when you forecast accurately, schedule efficiently, and do a great job of real-time
management, things can still go wrong. Planners learn from failure as much as from success, so
it’s important to analyze the results, perform a root cause analysis, and put in place the changes
needed to improve performance in the next cycle. Plus, reports are really useful to team leaders
during appraisals and 1:1s with their agents.