Paul Stitt explains why it is high time all contact centres abandoned their spreadsheets in favour of Workforce Management (WFM) software.
Contact centre planners who currently use spreadsheets to forecast workload and schedule agents must feel the hair on the back of their neck standing up every time WFM is mentioned.
It seems it’s very much a case of ‘we’ve always done it this way’. But can WFM software be ignored any longer when up to 70% of most contact centres’ costs are associated with their employees?
A common misconception is that spreadsheets cost nothing! Here are some interesting facts that should help dispel this myth.
1. Cost of errors
While spreadsheets are extremely popular in contact centres for staff planning, they are notorious for having some major flaws.
For example, Dartmouth College found “errors in 0.9% to 1.8% of all formula cells” (garbage in, garbage out), which could result in tangible costs.
The cost of getting your forecasts and staffing calculations wrong can mean serious under-staffing, which will impact negatively on customer service and service-level targets (which can result in penalties), or over-staffing, which generates a higher wage bill.
2. Cost of labour
There is also the cost of labour to think about.
It takes time to create accurate forecasts! Spreadsheets are very labour intensive, especially when it comes to getting data for forecasting, as all of the historical data from the ACD has to be manually entered to generate a forecast.
Creating accurate rule-compliant schedules is also time consuming. Someone has to do the Erlang staffing calculation, which is ok for inbound calls, but what about outbound, email, webchat?
In this era of the multichannel, multi-skilled contact centre, we can rely on multi-activity scripting from WFM, which can help generate scheduling efficiency by doing more with less.
3. Cost of poor agent interaction
It can be very time consuming for a planner (especially in a 50+ seater) contact centre to interact with each agent on a 1-2-1 basis.
Once published, schedules produced on a spreadsheet are not easily updated and shift swaps, and holiday requests can create havoc in the planning process.
As a result, agents themselves can become demotivated and leave. If training and recruitment typically cost around 8% of contact centre expenditure, it can be worth reducing attrition using a WFM tool with a built-in agent portal to improve morale and agent buy-in.
4. Spend a little money to make a lot of money
Paul Stitt
WFM software has been around since the 1970s and has become easier to use, thanks to clever algorithms and intuitive interfaces.
Cloud (SaaS) solutions have also made WFM much more affordable by charging a low monthly subscription and allowing contact centres to scale up or down depending on demand.
And even a small percentage increase in scheduling efficiency can mean a staffing cost reduction and money in the bank.
Are you working smarter yet?
With thanks to Paul Stitt at injixo
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 19th Aug 2015 - Last modified: 18th Dec 2018
Read more about - Archived Content, Peopleware
