Workforce Management Featured Article
Workforce Management Improves Operations Before, During and After a Shift
While most organizations today are aware that their contact centers ought to be becoming “centers of excellence” or places where customer experience magic happens, a far fewer number of organizations are able to pull it off. While white papers tout the magic of speech analytics and turning agents into inside sales personnel, these achievements make some assumptions: that the contact center has managed to get the basics down first.
The basics, of course, generally refer to hiring, staffing and seating relatively competent people, providing them with a telephony system and customer records, and distributing calls to them in such a way that customers don’t have to wait on hold. You can engage in all the upselling and cross-selling you want and empower your agent to do grand things, but if most of your customers are waiting on hold getting steamed, it won’t do you much good.
A high quality contact center, therefore, begins with a good forecast and a solid schedule to ensure that the right people are in the right place at the right time. Many contact centers, unfortunately, still approach scheduling in a highly erroneous manual way, using spreadsheets and algorithms to try and wing it as best they can. Some people are very good at this skill and have been doing it a long time. But the truth is that no matter how great your schedule is before the shift starts, if problems occur during the shift, you are sunk. According to a recent blog post by Monet Software’s Chuck Ciarlo, this is when the best-laid plans sometimes fall apart.
“It’s also when WFM software proves its superiority over spreadsheets,” writes Ciarlo. “One of its best features is intra-day management, a graphical display of real-time call center activity that lets managers check their schedule accuracy. If the forecast and schedule is out of sync, customer service is suffering and so is the call center budget. Fifteen minutes a day may not seem like much, but if agents are out of adherence that long every day, the result can be tens of thousands of dollars in additional staffing costs.”
In other words, say goodbye to your grand plans for fascinating and compelling your customers. If you can’t even pick up their calls in a timely manner, the rest is just a pipe dream. Ciarlo also notes that workforce management solutions can also help after the shift, noting that there is value to the data collected from every shift. WFM software tracks agent performance, achievement of key performance indicators and schedule accuracy, as well as costs and revenue. This helps a contact center meet its goals and create even better schedules in the future.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi