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The Case for Workforce Management

By Keith Dawson (News - Alert),
Principal Analyst, Frost & Sullivan

It’s hard to imagine that after all these years, we still need to make the case for WFM – is one of the most effective tools available for call centers to make resource allocation decisions. And yet, a lot of people still don’t use it, or use it to its full potential.

About six months ago, Frost & Sullivan did an end user survey of contact center managers. We asked all sorts of questions about their centers, how they operate and what kinds of technology they use. When we asked about WFM, we found that a solid 58 percent of American centers were using it. On one level, that seems pretty good: you’d think if three-fifths of a group is using something that it would represent a pretty solid consensus that something works, right?

But then you have to put that in context against the fact that WFM has been around for decades and so is a very stable, well understood set of technologies. It makes you wonder about the other 42 percent who aren’t using WFM. What are they doing to manage their workforce? The answer, unfortunately, is that there are still an awful lot of homegrown, manual systems out there.

When we asked people who were not using WFM what factors had gone into their decision to bypass this tried and true technology, they far and away answered: cost. That was the No. 1 answer, cited by 53 percent of respondents in our survey. Historically that makes a lot of sense. Back in the old days – and by old days I mean the 1990s – WFM was a pretty expensive and complex proposition. It required a lot of computational horsepower at a time when processing hardware was very expensive, and it required a contact center to devote a team of experts to managing the system itself, as well as the schedules and workforce.

For a lot of mid-range centers 15 years ago, that put automated scheduling and forecasting out of reach. The product and technology landscape has changed a lot since then, making the ROI case for WFM a lot plainer, and the initial outlay for it a lot more manageable. But cost is still the first thing people think of, and represents a hurdle that we really need to get past because WFM is really the most effective single way to boost performance and make better resource decisions.

A surprisingly high portion of call center managers said that they were satisfied with manual methods of forecasting and scheduling. The entire labor supply chain, from on-boarding through training and then agent deployment, through the inevitable turnover and attrition, all of that costs a fortune, vastly more than just the hourly cost of the labor in the seats. But centers have vanishingly little control over most of the elements that go into that process – the easiest place to be more efficient is in having the correct number of people available for the number of calls that you have to handle.

There’s no lack of ROI in this scenario – there is a lack of will to articulate the ROI to the people outside the center who control the spending, especially IT. IT tends to think of problems as technology problems, not human resources problems, and that keeps them from seeing the big picture, and the value of human-focused technology.

So when people in call centers say that they are satisfied with manual methods of doing their forecasting and scheduling, what I think they are really saying is that they don’t have the will or the ammunition to tangle with people who aren’t going to understand that the call center is a labor-driven institution. And just as you wouldn’t consider doing your payroll by hand or with a homegrown Excel spreadsheet, you really shouldn't be doing something that's as impactful to company costs as matching headcount to volume. It’s just too complex and important, and chances are you’re going to get it wrong.

I can almost guarantee that if you are running over 1,000 seats, and you are still scheduling by hand, you are not running a best-in-class contact center. For one thing, you simply don’t have the flexibility to adapt quickly to changing business conditions. For another, if you’re scrimping on the tools to match your labor to your calls, you are probably also cutting back on some of the other essentials, probably in the areas of quality assurance, coaching, training, maybe even in self-service.

The most compelling argument is found in reduced overall operating expenses. More efficient scheduling is going to produce tangible and measurable benefits in other call handling metrics besides labor – you’ll have shorter ASA times, lower call abandonment, the need for fewer lines and fewer callbacks, shorter connect times, and so on. The better your forecast and schedule, the more efficient the overall operations of the center will be.

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