Workforce Management: Maximizing ROI In Multimedia Contact Centers

BY DAVID VAN EVEREN

The contact center is the focal point of customer interactions and touches customers more often than any other part of an enterprise. The quality of that interaction between a company and its customer -- whether via phone, in e-mail, or Web chat session -- is often the deciding factor in customer loyalty. To be successful, companies must equip their contact centers with the tools to match the "right" service agents to each customer while optimizing the center's performance and cost structure. The new generation of workforce management software, in conjunction with a good strategy and implementation, enables companies to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and revenue, and decrease agent attrition while reducing operating costs.

Managing agent costs while providing outstanding service is a tough balancing act. Agents account for approximately 70 percent of the costs for an external support center and 80 percent for an internal help desk. With the complexity of multiple channels, the management challenge has been growing almost exponentially. Workforce management software is essential for any contact center with 75 agents or more to optimize agent productivity. It should also be a requirement for any contact center that receives more than 250 e-mails per day.

Workforce management solutions have greatly improved during the past two years, and the newer applications offer a great opportunity to improve your contact center's performance. The return on investment (ROI) from today's workforce management applications average 4 to 8 months, as compared to a few years ago when the payback was expected to take more than a year. The biggest differences are not the algorithms, which are still based on Erlang for calls, but ease of implementation, system usability, and functionality. More sophisticated workforce management products have special forecasting capabilities for e-mail or other types of deferred interactions. In some cases, today's workforce management applications can be in production and providing useful information within two to four weeks, with little or no need for ongoing support once the system is running.

Workforce Management Improves Customer Satisfaction
Customers expect their inquiries to be resolved at the point of contact. Best practice is for this to occur between 80 to 95 percent of the time. For this goal to be realized, enterprises need to leverage both people and technology. Workforce management applications that accurately forecast call, e-mail, and chat volumes improve customer satisfaction by allowing enterprises to plan and staff properly to meet projections. Enterprises that successfully apply workforce management use it to decide everything from how many people to hire six months from the current day, to the number and skill set of the people required to be on the phones or handling e-mail and chat sessions every fifteen minutes of each day.

Workforce Management Reduces Agent Attrition
A good workforce management strategy along with an effective application helps to reduce agent attrition. Contact centers are very difficult environments in which to work because the service staff confronts the best and worst of society. Customers are increasingly demanding and are not shy about sharing their opinions with agents. Agent attrition rates vary widely, from less than nine percent in the best-managed centers up to more than 80 percent.

A common complaint in high churn centers is constantly changing schedules. Whether agents are full-time employees, part-timers, seniors, or students, few can change their schedules at will to meet ever-fluctuating volumes. Best practice is to use workforce management to forecast and schedule, and allow agents to select their own schedules, or use automated means to ensure schedule consistency and meet individual preferences. This practice works best if the workforce management application is Web-based and agents, managers, and supervisors can access it from anywhere. Agents can't control the inquiries they receive, but job satisfaction and willingness to stay put increase when they are empowered to manage their schedules.

Implementing A Workforce Management Strategy
Enterprises that implement a workforce management application and expect it to resolve their agent productivity issues without a complementary strategy and adherence to best practices are going to be disappointed.

Implementing an effective workforce management strategy involves all contact center resources. Workforce management is a very customized function and most centers are unable or unwilling to change the majority of their practices to make a new application work. Enterprises vastly improve their chances of success with workforce management when they document their strategy and requirements prior to installing a workforce management application. For best results, look for a workforce management provider who can support the development of this strategy as well as supply and install the technology.

Selecting a Workforce Management Solution
Companies should select the technology that meets the majority of their needs and has the most positive ROI. (For tips on calculating ROI, see the sidebar below.) They should also look for a workforce management supplier that is investing in research and development in areas that match their future needs, and that is financially stable and has a good management team.

Besides these standard selection criteria, companies will improve their chances of success by working with a vendor that offers implementation expertise and ongoing consulting service; the vendor should understand the entire telephony and IP infrastructure that integrates with workforce management. Of particular importance in multimedia contact centers is that the technology supports a complex routing environment. The workforce management application should support customer segmentation and contribute to routing customer interactions based on agent skill, availability, and scheduled activities.

Conclusion
Workforce management remains one of the most under-appreciated applications in the contact center marketplace, even though the newer applications have a measurable 4 to 8 month ROI and are increasingly considered mission-critical.

According to a recent report by Frost & Sullivan, the penetration rate for workforce management software was less than 10 percent in 2001, but is expected to grow to 20 percent of the North American market by 2005. Workforce management applications not only improve productivity and service quality in contact centers but also increase customer satisfaction and decrease agent attrition. In the past, only contact center managers cared about workforce management -- today it impacts the entire organization.

David Van Everen is product line manager, Workforce Management for Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc.

1. Identify all incremental cash inflows and outflows required to implement the new application. Differentiate between one-time costs and ongoing annual expenses.
   
   
2. Obtain corporate guidelines for ROI calculations from the office of the CFO. If none are available, use the formulas in Excel or another spreadsheet program.
   
   
3. Prior to making any changes or implementing the new workforce management application, baseline the number of resources (agents, supervisors, and managers) assigned to phone calls, e-mails, and chat sessions. Also note the current service level.
   
   
4. Four weeks after implementing the workforce management application and adjusting schedules, recalculate the number of resources assigned to handling customer transactions and adjust for any significant increases and decreases in volumes. If the service level remains the same, better matching the needs of customers to resources should significantly reduce the resources required to handle customer transactions. Expect savings to vary from 10 percent on the low end to a high of 50 percent.
   
   Savings also come from reducing the number of supervisors, decreasing agent attrition (estimates are that it costs $5,000 to hire and train each new agent), and lowering customer churn (savings will be reflected based on the long-term value of customers). Workforce management applications also improve customer satisfaction but this is very hard to measure and quantify and therefore is not included in ROI calculations.
   
   
5. Re-calculate savings on a monthly basis for as long as you'd like to measure the ROI.
   
   
6. Communicate the success to senior management, as this will provide you with a great deal of credibility the next time you want to make an investment.

In addition, many workforce management vendors provide detailed ROI analysis during the RFP and software evaluation cycle. The metrics used by analyses may also provide a solid ROI benchmarking foundation, and will allow you to later correlate achieved results with expectations.