Workforce Management Featured Article

Workforce Management: Simple Solutions, Not Simple Analysis

Simple answers are nice—but they often are misleading.

While there may be a simple underlying truth, such as the need for greater staffing in a call center, it does not mean that the dynamics within the call center can be simplified through the use of a standard approach to scheduling and key performance indicators (KPIs).

For instance, a weekly variance of 4 percent might sound like staffing levels are appropriate and a call center is performing its job relatively well—but dig a little deeper and that 4 percent variance might be hiding the real situation.

This 4 percent variance for the week might have been reached after a week in which the Monday forecast was 12 percent under call volume, Tuesday was 8 percent under, but Wednesday through Friday were all 8 percent over projections, for instance.

Even though a 4 percent variance sounds good, when you dig deeper you might see that customer service probably suffered on Monday and Tuesday. Overstaffing and understaffing cancelled each other out, making the variance metric look decent. But the real situation within the call center was anything but ideal.

Avoiding such simplistic assessments is part of why workforce optimization software (WFO) is so important within the call center. A spreadsheet approach to staffing can easily fall into the trap above, since it is complex to set up a spreadsheet that can capture the inherent complexity of the call center. But with WFO software, the call center can far more easily achieve best practices without having to maintain a complex scheduling system—the WFO software takes care of the complexity.

In the above case, for instance, the best practices approach would be to use a standard deviation model, and by examining intra-day forecast accuracy as well as how close the daily or weekly numbers compared with the forecast. This would be automatic with WFO software, but it can easily be missed with the use of a simple spreadsheet.

“An automated workforce optimization solution can improve forecast accuracy and in turn, optimize schedule assignment, making sure all the necessary resources are always in place,” noted a recent Monet Software whitepaper on the topic of call center best practices.

By analyzing data in an integrated WFO tool, a manager can reference what processes allowed some agents to have lower talk time while meeting their quality targets, and then train the rest of the workforce using these processes, the paper noted.

“At that point, a lower average talk time goal may be set for the entire center, resulting in happier customers getting their calls answered more quickly and less overall abandons,” the paper added.

Simple is good. But simple assessment is not. This is why WFO software is almost as important as the phones that agents use each day. WFO software ensures that best practices and proper assessment is in place.