Optimise workforce webinar – Slides now available

Read all of the questions and answers…

So just how do you do it? By putting the right people in the right place at the right time doing the right things. Although this sounds frighteningly complex, it need not be as difficult as you think…

In this practical webinar, delegates will learn 7 invaluable ‘pearls of wisdom’ to help forecast customer demand and schedule contact centre workforces with precision, which, in turn, will make a dramatic impact on the bottom line. In addition, Novacroft, a leading provider of end-to-end smart ticketing solutions, will share real-life learning on how the move from spreadsheet-based forecasting to a workforce management solution has delivered tangible improvements in agent utilisation (up 25% within 4 months), employee satisfaction (now consistently 98%) and reduced labour costs (20%) – as well as the pitfalls to be avoided.

Copy of the slides

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Agenda

Top WFM challenges, Jonty Pearce, Editor, Call Centre Helper
7 ‘pearls of wisdom’ to optimise your workforce, Karl Judd, Business Manager – Europe & South Africa, GMT
Tangible performance improvement without the pitfalls – case study, Dan Outten, Head of Planning, Novacroft
Interactive Q&A

Topics to be discussed

Managing your workforce in alignment with strategic objectives
Achieving target service levels within a tightly defined operating budget
Working with the workforce to improve motivation and engagement
Implementing a Workforce Management solution – the potential benefits and pitfalls
Why spreadsheets just aren’t the right answer

The panellists


Jonty Pearce Call Centre Helper	Karl Judd GMT	Dan Outten Novacroft

This webinar is in association with GMT.

Questions and Answers:

Q: Does Dan use a holiday planner via WFM?
A: Dan uses the holiday planner to ensure that he does not go over his daily allowance. This is much more accurate and clearer than the old spreadsheet method. You don’t have to define holiday availability in the GMT Planet solution but Novacroft choose to do so.

Q: Can a WFM be used effectively with a blended solution?
A: Absolutely. WFM can be especially effective when inbound and outbound volumes are highly variable. WFM is also very useful in multi-media environments where agents are expected to handle a variety of types of interaction including voice calls, emails, web chats, etc.

Q: How often should shrinkage be updated or reviewed?
A: The frequency at which shrinkage should be reviewed is highly dependent on a number of factors. It can be as infrequently as annually or as frequently as monthly. Your shrinkage figure applied to your staffing requirement should certainly be adjusted when you experience a substantial change to your operation, such as a change in call volume, change in training requirements, change in absenteeism or changes in full-time/part-time agent mix. Where a WFM solution is used, it should track shrinkage over time and apply this to your staffing requirement on an ongoing basis.

Q: How many staff are needed for Dan’s planning team?
A: Dan is the only “planner” in the contact centre but has support from the team leaders and CC Manager.

Q: Should WFM work out shrinkage for you – if not what is the best calculation?
A: Your WFM should be capturing holiday, meetings, training, etc. ahead of time and absenteeism, sickness, emergency holiday, etc. on the day. By doing so, it should be keeping track of shrinkage for you. At this level of detail, the results can be surprising. Shrinkage can range from a low of 10% to as much as 50% and over. Obviously, the higher the shrinkage, the greater the number of agents required to handle the workload – resulting in higher than desired labour costs. A WFM solution will apply your shrinkage to your staffing requirement if you desire. It should certainly be able to illustrate the difference in your staffing requirement calculations both before and after shrinkage is applied. Manual calculations re how shrinkage should be applied to your staffing requirement can be obtained easily from the Internet.

Q: Can an agent have too many skills?
A: At some point, you reach the “law of diminishing returns” on the number of skills you can reasonably expect an agent to possess. Our experience is that agent performance tends to degrade, and scheduling and intra-day management becomes more difficult, once an agent is assigned to more than 5-7 skills.

Q: Do you find that your focus has changed to spending more time pro-actively planning rather than maintaining systems and fire fighting?
A: Dan now has more time for proactive planning and analysis of data. He also gets to spend more time listening to agents’ improvements and suggestions by devoting 2 days a month for “planning forums”.

Q: How often and how time consuming is the administrative functions of the system to make it work effectively?
A: As above, Dan now has more time for proactive planning and analysis of data. He also gets to spend more time listening to agents’ improvements and suggestions by devoting 2 days a month for “planning forums”.

Q: I am interested in hearing about the organizational structure that support WFM. # managers and staff required to run it?
A: This is highly dependent on the number of agents in your call centre, the number of locations and how your organisation is structured. We’ve seen very large call centres managed with one or two centralised workforce planners and a handful of managers.

Q: Other benefits over using spreadsheets is the reporting element available from a WFM solution, how have Novacroft found the reporting from their WFM tool? i.e. absence tracking, adherence tracking?
A: As a planner I tend to use the “Mission Control” (i.e. GMT Planet’s real-time reporting dashboard) facility more than the reports. However, the team leaders use a lot of the different reports in Planet. The duty manager uses the break time and in-for-day reporting. Agent report (with lateness and absence summaries, etc.) are used for 1-2-1 and performance management purposes.

Q: What Workforce Management tool was used by Novacroft?
A: GMT Planet.

Q: Our operation is across 4 sites, what benefits/constraints would this create re implementing a WFM system?
A: One of the biggest benefits in implementing a WFM system over your 4 locations is to obtain a holistic, single view of all your agents across all your locations. For operations that are moving from individual sites to a virtual centre, a WFM solution provides a great modelling application to illustrate the improved utilisation of staff from such a change.

Q: What can GMT do over and above normal WFM programs from a forecasting perspective?
A: GMT’s forecasting is an extremely flexible tool that allows the user to exert significant control over the ‘parameters’ used in creating forecasts. Alternatively, the solution can run multiple automated scenarios to arrive at the optimum parameters on which this system will base its forecasting. Users can exclude anomalous data, include certain days or weeks in the forecast calculations and create campaign forecasts that help model the impact a marketing campaign might have on call volumes. The degree to which users can have this flexibility has resulted in GMT Planet exhibiting a forecasting accuracy of over 99% when tested in a production environment

Q: What is the scale of contact center at Novacroft and how much time was taken to implement the system?
A: Currently there are approximately 40 agents, but the number fluctuates in line with demand. The standard implementation took 16 weeks. Novacroft then had a period of dual running in parallel with their previous manual approach.

Q: If we focus on large-scale operations could we safely say that GMT could handle as much as 400 seats, 1,000 agents?
A: GMT Planet is in use with contact centre operations ranging from as few as 26 agents to as many as 9,000. A contact centre of 400 or even 1,000 agents is well within GMT’s scalability and performance targets.

Q: What type of report can you create from systems such as this and how easy is it to do?
A: GMT Planet supports over 190 standard reports providing management information across a wide spectrum of operational metrics. New or custom reports are easily created as GMT Planet uses the industry standard Crystal and Microsoft SQL Reporting Services reporting engines.

Q: Could it work with a small call centre or only large?
A: GMT Planet can be effectively used for very small contact centres as well as large ones. Several GMT clients have agent counts in the 20-30 agent range.

Q: What variety of agents’ skills did Novacroft have to account for?
A: All of Novacroft’s agents are multi-skilled. All agents are capable of handling all call types.

Q: In introducing GMT what proportion of technical time was required in the project to get the right granularity of data into the system or did it completely replace your previous call software? What issues did this pose?
A: As part of the implementation, GMT captured employee and historical call data from us. GMT then took care of importing this into the system. The previous manual resource planning approach with spreadsheets is no longer used.

Q: What were the main concerns of the staff in relation to the system and integrating it into the workplace?
A: The agents were mainly concerned about the fact that they would be scheduled as opposed to on a rota. On the rota they knew where they would be ‘x’ weeks from now. The schedule is released 3 weeks in advance. Also they were concerned about what sorts of shifts would be required (e.g. a late every other week).

Q: Who in your experience is accountable for shrinkage accuracy, WFM or the operation?
A: Both. The WFM tool should be able to report accurately against the number of call centre staff required against those that were actually scheduled. Intra-day management, including intra-day reforecasting, plays a big role in this as one of the major factors in shrinkage is absenteeism, which cannot always be planned for. The operation is responsible for making sensible changes in the contact centre operation based on the unplanned absences.

Q: Should shrinkage accuracy be included also?
A: Yes.

Q: Is multimedia supported?
A: Yes. GMT Planet has many workload drivers to support non-call work. Likewise, GMT Planet can support streams of workload that provide a rich data set re volumes, distribution and handle times, to those work streams that provide very little data.

14 Jul 2009

Filed under Call Centre News, Webinars , GMT