Contact Center Workforce Management

What is Workforce management?

Contact center running costs heavily depend on the human resources required to operate the center. Therefore, companies are trying consistently to reduce these costs by increasing the efficiency of the centers and maximizing productivity out of a certain number of employees. For large contact centers with a lot of employees, this kind of management cannot be performed manually without missing out a lot. Appropriate software has been developed to this end, called human resource workforce management software (WFM).

Traditional workforce management in a contact center has been performed by using spreadsheets. However, especially for larger numbers of employees, spreadsheets are inefficient and time consuming. The WFM software that has been developed today can automatically perform complex tasks such as scheduling, satisfying staffing requirements, forecasting, managing real-time changes and a lot more. These tasks are essential for large contact center management, to ensure smooth operations and maximize staff productivity.

Workforce management functionality: forecasting, scheduling and more.

Forecasting is probably the most important benefit of using workforce management software, and the key reason that justifies buying such software over using a spreadsheet. A good schedule can substantially reduce costs by using the correct amount of staff at any given time. This can be achieved by analyzing historical data, to predict traffic spikes and low traffic periods. The forecasted volumes are then converted to actual number of agents needed to serve the traffic at any given time. Better seat management can be achieved and part-time agents can be hired to meet potentially increased demands while keeping costs low. In the case that part of the contact center is outsourced, WFM software can also help with creating the schedules for these resources also.

Scheduling is also important from agent point of view. Historical data help in making fair decisions about vacation planning (business rules, history of schedules, shift bids etc). Manual interventions and adjustments to the automatically produced schedule can help satisfy specific agent needs and preferences in many occasions. Correct utilization of workforce management software can thus reduce agent over utilization and eventual burnout (experience has shown that good workforce management systems can satisfy up to 70-80% of agent preferences).

Workforce management software includes other helpful features such as reporting tools. It gathers a lot of real-time information about operations and provides useful reports. Based on these reports, micromanagement of agent performance can be also heavily improved. Workforce management software monitors their adherence to schedule, arranges breaks in a way that they don’t overlap etc.  Reporting also helps in quick reactions when something needs to change urgently. For example, in a customer support contact center, when a major service outage occurs, the software can predict how many extra agents have to be called in to serve the traffic spike (based on real-time data as well as historical data of similar situations).

Workforce optimization: the next step after workforce management.

Workforce optimization (WFO) is an evolution of the concept of workforce management. It is a unified software suite of WFM software along with tools for quality management, recording, coaching, performance management, speech analytics etc. All these tools combined can be used to improved overall contact center performance, by providing information that the center supervisors can act upon quickly.

The WFM/WFO industry still has a lot of growth potential, since the majority of contact centers currently still use simple spreadsheets to manage their staff. A market research report on the WFM industry by DMG consulting shows 30% growth for 2009 which is the biggest growth for the particular industry ever. The offering of WFM/WFO suites on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model as well as the increased number of vendors offering such suites could potentially make WFM/WFO components affordable even for smaller call centers.