Webinar: WFM – The business case for your business

Slides are available from our webinar on the business case along with all of the Questions and Answers.

This webinar will provide invaluable ‘top tips’ on how to create a business case for WFM – from understanding the ‘symptoms’ of inefficient contact centres, to identifying and articulating achievable business outcomes in the contact centre that will benefit the wider organisation.

This webinar will explore the ROI of real-life WFM implementations, as well as emerging trends in this business-critical area.

Agenda

Introduction – Jonty Pearce, Editor, Call Centre Helper

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WFM: The business case for your business – Simon Angove, CEO, GMT Corporation

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Interactive Questions and Answers

Topics to be discussed:

The early indicators of inefficient contact centres
The objectives you should set to give yourself the best chance of success
Tangible ROI delivered by strategic WFM implementations
Common pitfalls to be avoided at all costs
Winning agents’ ‘hearts and minds’
Latest WFM trends and developments

This webinar is provided by Call Centre Helper and is being sponsored by GMT Corporation

Questions & Answers:

Q1: How do you calculate the staff attrition?

A1: Staff attrition is calculated based on the organisation’s actual experienced turnover. This is then used to forecast into the future using historical trending algorithms.

Q2: Can WFM be easily integrated to a payroll system?

A2: Integration capabilities, such as with payroll systems, should be considered to be a vital component of any WFM solution. We can’t speak for others’ platforms but, as part of our “Open WFO” approach, GMT Planet already integrates with many of the currently available and best known payroll systems. Where the integration already exists it is indeed “easy” to integrate and, furthermore, not cost prohibitive to do so.

Q3: One issue I have faced in the past with WFM is the mix that is needed between language and product skills. For example a bilingual rep who knows 2 products. Do today’s WFM solutions manage the language dimension better than they used to do several years ago?

A3: Once again, we can only really answer this question in the context of our own platform, GMT Planet. In which case, the answer is, emphatically, “yes.” Within Planet, each operator’s skills (in this case language and product knowledge) would be identified as a skill – when the scheduling element of the software is used it takes the skills of the agents into full consideration to provide the best fit to answer all contacts in an optimised way. This is possible thanks to Planet featuring a full scheduling engine and not one based solely upon Erlang C. The engine runs many thousands of variations on the data to provide best fit of the schedule to the forecast/requirements for each contact type, in this case, language and product knowledge; in turn this provides a schedule detailing what function agents will be covering at all times during their shifts.

Q4: Does the solution work just as effectively for a smaller-scale Helpdesk environment with circa 20-25 agents handling multiple contact types 24 x 7?

A4: GMT Planet works very well for smaller operations (as well as for the very largest) handling multiple contact types 24 x 7. GMT has a number of existing customers in this category, most of whom have seen have seen drastic improvements since deploying the solution. These improvements are due mainly to the fact that each employee is a greater percentage of the workforce and thus has a greater impact when changes are made to schedules/breaks, etc. It is worth noting that, where contact volumes are very low, forecast accuracy may be less in percentage terms, however, thanks to rounding this makes little or no difference to the numbers of people required to deliver an optimised service.

Q5: Would you deal with back-office business case in the same way?

A5: Yes. However, to expand on this statement: GMT Planet can (and does) deal with back-office functions – the underlying principles are largely the same, however, the approach to calculating the staffing requirements is slightly different. This is due to the (generally) longer response times, meaning that workload can be allowed to accumulate and be dealt with, for example, overnight or within “x” days as the Service Level target dictates. Spreadsheets and Erlang C are no match for such delayed processes.

Q6: We are interested in finding out more detail regarding the Value Discovery process.

A6: Please contact Keir Woolhouse on +44(0) 845 080 0398 who will be able to allocate a member of his Resource Planning Consultancy team to explain the Value Discovery process in greater detail.

Q7: Won’t AHT depend on the kind of calls you answer?

A7: AHT indeed depends on the call type – In GMT Planet each call type is uniquely identified and data against it is captured to analyse the AHT within the application – this is then used during the forecasting stage to predict your AHT per call type and in turn the staffing requirements to handle the traffic.

Q8: I have a dept. that works 10 hrs. a day, as per the calls offered we need 7 FTEs to meet 80% SL, we have exactly the same number of FTEs scheduled, however the occupancy is still at 50%.

A8: There are many reasons why this might be happening. However, trying to identify them without first understanding your operation and seeing your data set would mean making assumptions – please contact Keir Woolhouse on +44 (0)845 080 0398 and he will allocate one of his Resource Planning Consultants to look into this with you.

Q9: What are the other ways of forecasting call volumes and AHT apart from Excel?

A9: WFM solutions, rely on a range of sophisticated algorithms and the very best, such as GMT Planet, also have the capability to run tens or even hundreds of thousands of simulations in order to forecast demand more accurately and schedule resources in order to ensure an optimised solution. In order to illustrate the level of accuracy that may be achieved, we attach below an actual graph that was sent to us in January by one of our customers in the UK together with some text that we think says it all:

Daily Contacts – ACC – Jan 2011

Just thought I’d let you know that we started to use the GMT forecasts for our LeanSigma reporting and we saw a 99.8% accuracy.

With multiple contact methods and types, Excel really cannot factor all these together with the multi-skilling options of the staff members. We really recommend a far more specifically designed tool for the job, i.e. WFM – this means all factors are included and nothing is missed regarding (weighted) trends, etc. in history and making allowance for bad data, exceptions and conditional factors, etc. Even at a basic level (when compared to a fully-fledged WFM solution), Excel starts to suffer from flexibility, speed and file size limitations and is simply not fit for purpose.

Q10: Does GMT’s software have a forecasting module?

A10: GMT Planet has as standard a forecasting module. The forecasting element itself has proven to be highly accurate providing there is sufficient call (or other) volume and historical data available. As mentioned in our response to Q.9, one of our customers in the UK recently reported 99.8% forecast accuracy!

Q11: In the introduction – mentioned about “working mums”, “students”, etc. – how best to ensure these placements are advertised? Would you go direct to colleges etc.?

A11: Clearly, WFM doesn’t deal with this aspect directly; it provides call forecasting, staffing needs, and shift planning functionality along with associated reporting, etc. We would recommend speaking firstly to your staff, HR and to a recruitment specialist regarding your requirements. As our response to this question freely indicates, WFM is only one (though crucially important) component, when considering resourcing best practice in the round. This is why we stress the importance of areas such as change management and winning and maintaining the “hearts and minds” of all stakeholders in any WFM deployment – as we always say, “great software poorly implemented and supported guarantees failure.”

11 May 2011 - Filed under Webinars , GMT