Workforce Management Featured Article
What 2014 Might Bring the Workforce Management Function
While we’ve run many articles on the trends and predictions for 2014 for the overall contact center, we haven’t offered any previews on the specific components that make the contact center tick. Since labor is the largest costs of most contact centers, it makes sense to take a look at what’s ahead for workforce management.
The cloud, of course, is the big news with most contact center solutions and applications. Already in growth mode among smaller contact centers, cloud installations are starting to ripple up the food chain to larger organizations. While CRM remains the single biggest area where cloud solutions are proliferating, it’s probable that workforce management will start to close that gap as well. The modern contact center, after all, isn’t premise-based. It’s a multi-site function that may encompass home-based agents and a third-party contact center outsourcing company to fill in gaps. For this reason, a workforce management solution that can be used in only one office is becoming increasingly impractical.
According to a recent blog post by Bob Clements of management consultant Axsium, we have mobile workforce management to look forward to, as well. As more and more employees carry or even work on smartphones and tablets, they are increasingly asking to be able to check their schedules and interact with workforce management (shift or vacation bidding) via their mobile devices. While many organizations have been nervous to take that so far, Clements says this will start to change this year.
“There will be a groundswell of pressure from employees that want access to their schedules from their phones and employers will finally figure out a strategy to allow that to happen,” said Clements, who also noted that another major trend, the social element, will also start to creep into workforce management, allowing for knowledge sharing and cross-departmental input in an organization.
Another area that is likely to see changes is the real-time abilities of workforce management to allow managers to make changes on the fly.
“One of the big disconnects between what goes on in workforce management and what goes on in the real world is speed,” wrote Clements. “Schedules get written well in advance of when they are worked. When an employee shows up for a shift, he or she is assigned someplace to work based on the schedule or the manager’s expectation for what is going to happen that day. But, these days, business changes fast. Staffing demands fluctuate across jobs and departments at a moment’s notice.”
Most organizations today have some sort of “big data” project underway that involves using analytics to create real-time intelligence for the organization. Workforce management can be particularly helped by this trend, as schedules created yesterday or this morning are often quite different from schedules this afternoon. Clement notes that our ability to process large amounts of unstructured data has improved significantly and real-time workforce management is possible, though adoption has been slow. 2014 will very probably become the year that companies really begin to take advantage of these capabilities.
Given the ability of workforce management to save on labor costs and boost productivity, it’s an area that is ripe for further refinement and advancement, and we’re likely to begin seeing that this year.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi