The workforce management cycle

Fulfilling service levels while managing costs is an iterative cycle that requires several key processes to be completed. Feedback secured from each stage allows the enterprise to continually improve its efficiency and become more confident about its predictions. (see Figure 1) Workforce management systems should offer the following functionalities to support the modern customer-focused enterprise:

§  Scheduling to meet service levels

§  Adherence

§  Reporting and forecasting

§  What-if scenarios

§  Virtual contact center/multisite support

§  Compliance with employment law, rules, and union regulations

§  Multimedia support

§  Web-driven interfaces and tools

Figure 1: Workforce management cycle.

Scheduling to meet service levels

Scheduling is not as simple a process as it may appear. Knowledgeable organizations take CSR preferences and skill sets into account when scheduling. The "warm-body" approach to solving human resource issues—regarding one CSR the same as any other—will cause both agent-satisfaction and customer-service problems. Most companies using advanced workforce management software will have between 6 and 9 skillsets to work with, although a few contact centers use as many as 50. Business needs must come first, however, so a scheduler needs to find the best way to match the company's requirements with the skills of its employees. Scheduling can get particularly complicated in a multimedia environment, which usually has CSRs with multiple media-handling skills—voice, e-mail, text chat, and so on—and multiple business abilities such as sales, service product knowledge, and languages. Businesses must look for a solution that does not oversimplify the scheduling process, yet retains usability and the flexibility to make changes.

Prior to planning staffing resources, an organization needs to have an understanding of past history. A WFM system that provides historical data from all customer contacts, based on input from CTI as well as the ACD, means that scheduling can be more realistic. The WFM solution should enable organizations to factor in exceptions that affect staff workload—advertising campaigns, training, public holidays, and other special events and occasions—and determine the best time for a meeting or training session, as well as measure the impact on the overall operation of the center. Thus, an important factor in assessing the capabilities of WFM tools is flexibility in forecasting functionality, because situations can develop very quickly that make forecasts useless without the ability to alter schedules to reflect reality.

Adherence

Adherence is the ability to compare forecasts with reality and to use this information to correct problems. Sophisticated scheduling and forecasting is useless without the opportunity to improve the process through adherence monitoring. Real-time adherence allows managers to see exactly what is happening and can alert them to deviations from the expected activity, allowing them to make changes before problems occur. Adherence allows a business to fine-tune its call/contact center activity; the more it is used, the more accurate the forecasts and schedules will be.

The objective of call/contact center managers should be to look for a solution that is simple to understand so the staff will feel comfortable using it and that has the power and functionality to help the center manager understand what has happened and to make necessary changes quickly.

Reporting and forecasting

The ability of managers and supervisors to see exactly what is happening via real-time reports is key to the workforce management process. Reporting provides a measure of success in achieving targets. Standard reports that are important for determining efficiency include

§  Speed of answer

§  Average call-handling time

§  Talk plus Not-ready plus Non-ACD

§  Delay before abandon

§  E-mail handling time

§  Percentage of calls abandoned

§  Number of interactions waiting

Workforce management systems can be excellent for gauging the efficiency of a center and also forecasting results, but including CRM-focused measures, such as customer satisfaction, increase in market share, and improvement in loyalty levels, is more difficult. These metrics are just as important as the queue-centric reports, and businesses should make sure they capture and extract this information from their systems. The more statistics from various sources that can be brought together consistently, the more accurate the view of customer-focused activity. There is no point in striving to achieve high levels of efficiency if customers remain unhappy with the service provided or unknowledgeable about products they should be buying. Taking into account and reacting to business metrics, as well as the service-level measures that workforce management systems are so effective at providing, is important to assessing the overall performance of the center.

What-if scenarios

One of the most useful tools for call/contact center managers, particularly in a multimedia environment, is the ability to see what will happen to service levels if an event occurs, before that event occurs. Sophisticated workforce management systems allow managers to try out what-if scenarios, at no risk to the center's operational ability, by providing a way to model various scenarios.

Using these modeling techniques, the contact center manager can, for example, understand how the center workload would change if the following events occurred:

§  A new advertising campaign increases call volumes.

§  A large number of untrained agents start work at the same time.

§  A new multimedia channel becomes available to customers.

§  A key product line is offered at a discount.

What-if scenarios are very useful in directing long-term strategies, such as planning, budgeting, and recruitment.

Virtual contact center/Multisite support

An increasing trend in some global enterprises, especially in larger markets such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France is to have several call/contact centers servicing customers. This operational model has been driven by a number of developments, including

§  Rapid call/contact center growth in particular areas that has caused recruitment and retention problems

§  The increased number of call/contact centers for businesses involved in acquisitions or mergers

§  Teleworking and remote call center locations that mean CSRs may never see their parent center

§  The preference of some companies to offer a "local touch" to customers by basing centers in their area

§  Improvements in networking and telephony that make it easier to establish virtual centers

§  The increasing need of companies to serve global customers, requiring either operating contact centers in different time zones or paying overtime to CSRs to work covering hours

§  The possibilities of operational redundancy and disaster recovery with multisite centers

Combining multiple smaller centers into one large center can provide significant economic benefit through simple economies of scale. Correctly staffing five 100-seat call/contact centers is generally more complex and less efficient than staffing a single 500-seat operation. This is especially true when skills-based routing via a universal queue is being used. All agent competencies are displayed to the scheduler, who can be more flexible simply because the available resource pool is so much deeper.

Compliance: union rules, regulations, and the law

Different countries have different labor laws, and a superior workforce management system has to be easily configurable to take into account union regulations, laws, and other rules applying to businesses. For example, companies based in the member states of the European Union must take into account the Working Time Directive, which specifies that employees must work no more than 48 hours per week and restricts working nights, holidays, and breaks. The monitoring of CSRs is regulated by law in Germany, where monitoring by name is considered to be an invasion of privacy. An evaluation of WFM systems needs to include whether or not a solution can be easily adapted to each specific country's regulations.

Multimedia support

Workforce management systems provide a significant benefit to call/ contact center managers by answering one of the most urgent questions center managers ask themselves: How do I staff my multimedia contact center? Many so-called contact centers simply give agents a few e-mails to deal with when call volumes decrease, but when call volumes rise, e-mails are forgotten. Contact center managers may be quite capable of efficiently managing telephony-only call centers. In many cases, their experience allows them to make good judgment calls on these operational issues, based on years of experience. However, managing the multimedia contact center challenges even the most seasoned call center manager, because multimedia contacts and transactions are fundamentally different from telephone calls and must be handled differently. This is a situation that can lead to staffing issues, for the following reasons:

§  CSR competencies have to be considered. Good telephony CSRs may not have the skills required to be good at handling e-mail or text chat contacts, where quick typing speed is required along with strong technology skills and correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation. CSRs good at written customer service may not have the listening or verbal communication skills required for telephony service.

§  Customers have different levels of expectation depending on the channel they are using. Most customers expect a response via e-mail within 24 hours, whereas a typical telephony service level is 80% of calls to be answered within 20 seconds.

§  Standard responses using e-mail can speed up the process considerably.

§  Batch customer requests—e-mail, fax, and letter—are, by definition, not interactive. Additional resources may be needed to deal with incomplete requests.

§  Telephone queues are essentially self-managing. If the phone is not answered quickly enough, the call is abandoned and the phone queue decreases. With e-mail, contacts back up until they are dealt with, a situation that can present serious problems.

§  E-mails may get "stale-dated" because the customer loses interest, gives up on the e-mail, and calls the center for a verbal response. This leads to a nonproductive, time- and resource-wasting cycle of answering dead e-mails while live ones go unattended until they too go out-of-date!

§  Costs increase as the unsatisfied e-mail customer rings the contact center to find out what happened to the e-mail. Where e-mails are held separately from transactions—that is, in organizations where the universal queue and universal routing are not being used—the e-mail may remain live even after the issue has been resolved.

§  In the early stages of multimedia contact implementation, extra time should be allowed for each nontraditional transaction. CSRs will still be adapting to the process and the time per transaction should decrease as they become accustomed to the new environment.

§  Customers also need time to familiarize themselves with new contact methods such as text chat and Web collaborations.

Experience has shown that many customers using Web collaboration for the first time enjoy the experience so much they spend longer than needed with each CSR.

Sales-focused call/contact centers will notice a rise in calls after a marketing campaign. In addition to the spike in calls after TV ads,

§  E-mail advertising will produce a similar spike in inbound contacts with a range of different patterns.

§  Interactive digital TV will produce major spikes in e-mail activity after TV commercials, which may well extend to text chat and Web collaboration as well, depending on how many channels the enterprise opens up.

§  Different patterns of usage emerge from these new channels. Interactive TV is used more in the evenings, when most people return from work, whereas direct e-mail campaigns are likely to get an immediate response depending on where people access their e-mail.

The call/contact center manager has some advantages when handling e-mail, because supporting e-mail is not dependent on the time of day. This means the scheduler has a considerable amount of freedom in trying to reduce the backlog. For example, some contact centers bring in students in the late evening to answer e-mails when most of the full-time CSRs have left the center. Others can answer e-mails through the night by employing people in other time zones—India, the Philippines, and Australia. In addition, the cost of e-mail is not location-dependent, given the resources available to the World Wide Web. It costs as much to route an e-mail around the globe as it does to send it to the person next door. And although telephone calls still have an associated long-distance cost, the difference between the two channels will become even less when VoIP becomes used globally. All of these points need to be considered when scheduling and forecasting for nontraditional types of contact. Additionally, how multimedia contacts will be handled must be decided. Will they be handled by dedicated agents or by blended agents, a process that could be more effective in a universal queue model and that has very positive effects on agent satisfaction?

A large number of operational headaches in call/contact centers are caused by not resourcing tasks correctly. New-generation workforce management systems will go a long way toward helping managers run things more smoothly and efficiently. Next-generation workforce management solutions will focus strongly on allowing call/contact center managers to plan long-term strategies. They will use these tools to model their operations based on various assumptions (for example, agent turnover at 20%, fixed agent career paths, 25% of workload being e-mail). Rather than having to react to external forces, the center manager will know how to resource the operation effectively before events actually happen as well as understanding their effects on the business.

WFM tools are very useful in assisting managers to prepare for sudden changes in call volume and other peaks and valleys that often come along without warning. For these situations, WFM can provide a warning, and it is often intuitive enough to see patterns in call histories and discern peaks and valleys that even experienced call center managers could not anticipate. A good example is holiday scheduling. Holidays bring together two divergent elements that most directly affect the call center. Calls surge up in unusual ways; however, they are predictable if the patterns that drive them are recognized. At holiday time, employees tend to have a variety of counterproductive demands, such as days off, flexible schedules, vacations, and time with families. WFM software predicts the call load for a given day from historical data. It provides information about how many calls are going to come in at any moment and allows managers to match that load effectively to the human resources available, even at times of unusual call patterns. Thus managers can act quickly to handle any divergence between people and calls, either days ahead of time or within a shift.

The preceding are just a few of the examples of improvements in efficiency and optimization of resources that WFM tools can provide, factors that take on new significance in a multimedia center. The following sections summarize the benefits of WFM and provide some guidelines for measuring the results obtained from WFM.