What is workforce management?

Workforce management in a call center is the art and science of having the right number of employees, with the right skills at the right times to meet accurately forecasted volumes of work and to do all that at a predetermined service level and minimized costs. Workforce management is a critical task for call centers and poor planning and execution can have a negative impact on the business (revenues, cost), customers (satisfaction) and also employees (motivation/burn-out). Key tasks of workforce management include the following activities:

1. Calculation of an accurate forecast

• Collect call history data
• Identify call patterns (day, week, season, etc.)
• Identify special day patterns (holidays, etc.)
• Identify other event or business drivers that might impact call volume/pattern
  

2. Calculation of staffing requirements

• Define Service level, ASA and average handle time
• Calculate workload
• Define staffing requirements

3. Creation of schedule

• Include all activities (call and non-call) into schedule
  
• Build in flexibility (start/end times, breaks, multi-skill, etc.)
• Create schedule for 15 or 30 minute increments
  

4. Monitoring and managing adherence

• Inform and educate about adherence importance and impact
• Measure and manage adherence throughout the day (real-time adherence)
  
• Provide incentives

5. Managing exceptions and changes throughout the day

• Changes in call volume or arrival pattern
  
• Staffing or scheduling issues
• Business related exceptions

6. Measuring and adjusting

• Analyze daily/weekly reports
• Investigate causes for under-performance
• Apply learnings into workforce management process

Many organizations still employ a manual approach to workforce management. By relying on paper- or spreadsheet-generated estimates, they lack any way to accurately measure the degree of adherence to the schedule. Reporting, if done at all, is a nightmare. The end product is too much time and effort spent managing staff for little return.
Workforce management software helps organizations to automate key tasks that have an immediate impact on the bottom line through more accurate call volume forecasting, optimized scheduling and daily performance tracking in real-time.

How to simplify call center scheduling

Do you spend too much time on call center scheduling and still don't get the expected results? That's what we hear quite often when we talk to prospective customers. Either the forecast/schedule is not accurate enough, or it takes just too long to work through the spreadsheets and data from various sources, or both. There has to be a better way. There is - please join us for our upcoming webinar "How to simplify your call center scheduling" on May 27 at 10 a.m. PST. and learn how you can simplify your forecasting and scheduling work. We hope to see you.

Workforce management: Think big for small or medium sized call centers

It may be hard to believe, but smaller or medium-sized call centers are more difficult to manage because every agent and every call has more effect on the overall performance. If you have a 20 agent center and one agent is not available, you have a “5% resource problem” immediately. Or in call center terms, if your goal is an ASA (Average Speed of Answer) of 30 seconds for a 25 seat center, you might be surprised that the ASA changes to 59 seconds when only one agent is not available to take calls.
So, how can you manage this more efficiently with limited resources? You need to put more emphasis on accurate forecasting; a more flexible schedule and increased schedule adherence, which will have a positive impact on costs, services levels and service quality. With new web- and cloud-based WFM solutions even smaller call centers can take advantage of sophisticated forecasting, more effective scheduling and real-time adherence monitoring without breaking the bank. Think big.

Three ways to improve service levels in your call center

Achieving targeted service levels while keeping payroll cost under control and within budget is one of the key challenges in a call center. In our upcoming webinar "3 Ways to Improve Service Levels in your Call Center" we will explain how three important forecasting and scheduling tasks impact service levels:

• Schedule optimization: How to properly handle exceptions and place breaks, lunches, training, etc.

• Forecast versus actual: How to deal with call volume fluctuations and adjust schedules

• Schedule adherence: How to set goals, measure adherence and keep agents motivated to adhere to schedules

Please join us for this free webinar on Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) - we hope to see you.