WFM May Help Address the Healthcare Talent Gap

With the unemployment rate at 3.7 percent, talent is a seller’s market today. The healthcare space is one industry vertical most in need of people. Our aging population is a key factor driving demand for healthcare talent.

“The aging of baby boomers means that within just a couple decades, older people are projected to outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history,” said Jonathan Vespa of the U.S. Census Bureau. “By 2035, there will be 78 million people 65 years and older compared to 76.7 million (previously 76.4 million) under the age of 18.”

However, Accenture (News - Alert) says that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a massive healthcare-related talent shortage. In its 2017 paper Accenture’s Healthcare Talent Shortage: Fact or Fiction? the firm says new strategies and technologies can help meet growing needs in this arena.

“Our Accenture Strategy U.S. Healthcare Workforce Model reveals that a talent equilibrium can be achieved by 2030 through advances in healthcare technology and changing talent practices,” the research and consulting firm writes. “New talent sourcing models that enable just-in-time utilization of freelance, on-demand, and virtual care workers are starting to emerge in healthcare. We believe that by 2030, just-in-time utilization of the workforce will eliminate 11 percent of today’s U.S. talent demand.”

Accenture’s study looks at this approach as it relates to nurses and physicians. But, the idea also applies to non-clinical staff, including contact center personnel.

For example, contact centers in the healthcare space can employ state-of-the-art workforce management technology to make better use of agents and more efficiently serve callers. Today’s WFM solutions deliver accurate forecasts, so contact center managers can create optimal schedules.

That may include scheduling based on agent skillsets. Considering agent skillsets in scheduling can enable contact centers to do skill-based routing to deliver better customer experiences and business outcomes.

Today’s WFM solutions also can track adherence in real time, and they can present that information in a graphical display making it easy for contact center managers to visualize what’s happening in their environments at all times. Then, they can make proper adjustments to situations as they arise.

That’s important, considering what the lack of schedule adherence can do to contact center productivity and customer service. The Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (News - Alert) illustrates what can happen when a contact center that needs 69 agents is short by four or 10.

“Note what happens with 65 staff in place,” it says. “The first impact is the obvious degradation of service, dropping from a 14 second [average speed of answer] to a 73 second ASA, an extra 59 seconds of delay time per call. With 69 staff in place, the occupancy would be a reasonable level of 89 percent, but when 4 people drop out, occupancy shoots up to 95 percent, a level that will be painful for those people that are actually on the phones.”

The society adds: “This situation is worsened by the fact that, as delays increase and occupancy rises, the talk time and after-call work time will likely go up, causing a higher workload, and an even worse speed of answer, occupancy, and cost increase than what we’ve noted here. Therefore, you can view the impact of non-adherence as these three detrimental effects, or you can simply plan for the loss in the shrinkage calculation and pad in the needed extra staff. Either way, there’s a significant cost to the center.”

More optimal scheduling, including adherence tracking and tweaking, can help address such situations. That can allow a contact center to deliver a higher level of customer service, prevent agents from feeling overloaded, and enable the contact center to meet its goals and retain its talent in a competitive job market.

Edited by Erik Linask