Is Your Workforce Management Sinking You?

Paul Stitt compares Workforce Management to navigating a ship at sea.

‘When the sea was calm, all ships alike showed mastership in floating’, wrote William Shakespeare in The Tragedy of Coriolanus. But what happens when the waters get rough in your call centre? Do customers wait for hours listening to sea shanties? Does your crew get washed overboard? Do your midshipmen rush around fire-fighting?

Workforce management (WFM) helps your contact centre to sail smoothly through troubled waters. It gives planners binoculars to see icebergs on the horizon, in the form of unexpected volume spikes, and take evasive manoeuvres to avoid a collision.

Accurate and timely forecasting gives early warning of unexpected stormy weather, so you can plot the correct course. You can quickly deploy the crew where they are needed by re-optimising breaks or tasks when sea-sickness strikes. It also automates tedious manual tasks that belong before the age of steam. It puts the planner on the bridge, instead of labouring in the engine room.

Without WFM, the planner is the captain of a ship without a compass.

Turn the tide on spreadsheets

It’s amazing what an able seaman can do with spreadsheets, but Excel has serious limitations when it comes to resource planning in call centres. Call volume and AHT data have to be entered manually instead of automatically retrieved from the ACD.

Maybe you can reproduce the Erlang formula in Excel, but what if you are handling outbound, emails or chat? And how about tracking agent schedule adherence in real time?

Forget it. WFM tools provide an agent self-service portal so that the entire crew is pulling in the same direction.

Get the right hands on deck

Generating optimised agent schedules requires algorithms of fiendish complexity beyond the capabilities of even the most sophisticated Excel user – and you can multiply that complexity by 100 if you are trying to optimally schedule multi-skilled agents.

Even if you can write macros to build shifts that match supply and demand, are you sure that they comply with agent contracts and the Working Time Directive?

Plotting a course to the right WFM harbour

You need a solution that will pay for itself almost immediately. The quicker the return on investment (ROI) and the faster the system can be implemented, the easier your business case will be to prove.

Forecasting, scheduling, monitoring, reporting and an agent portal which offers shift swaps, activity views and holiday requests, etc. should be included. Avoid costly capital expense (capex) on ‘on premise’ systems and look for a cloud solution that can be purchased from your operating expense (opex) budget.

A software as a service (SaaS) platform can guarantee high uptime and ensure all training, support, security and upgrades are built into a low recurring monthly fee. A cloud solution will interface with your ACD and without the need to purchase hardware or spend a fortune on ‘professional services’.

Test the waters first

By all means, check out the available vendors and ask lots of searching questions. Make sure that the system complies with the rules of the sea – like having data centres located inside the EU for compliance with the Data Protection Act. But don’t waste precious time on RFPs (requests for proposal).

Even the most complex and time-consuming RFPs give just the illusion of reduced risk. There is no substitute for trying out a system live aboard your own vessel.

With thanks to Paul Stitt at injixo