What Are the Benefits of Workforce Planning? Related Articles Workforce Planning: 20 Fundamental Rules Workforce Management Guide 18 Workforce Management Case Studies When Building Your Workforce Planning Model, Don’t Do It Alone © Visual Generation-Adobe-Stock-279725645 1,493 Filed under - Business Insights, Intraday, NICE, Scheduling, Workforce Management (WFM) Strategic workforce planning is part of the workforce management process used to predict the number of employees that are needed and then schedule and manage them to the operational goals. Effective workforce planning has many benefits, including understanding how many employees are needed to handle the workload, proper skilling of employees, and attrition rate, and to ensure that operational goals such as occupancy, shrinkage, and service levels are met. A Plan for the Future The planning portion of workforce management begins by looking into the future to determine hiring plans based on business growth/decline, capacity, use of outsourcers, and operational metrics used to measure success for the business. Organizations benefit from long-range workforce planning by being able to model any number of scenarios with the business to determine the right number of employees that are required to handle the workload. These plans are then converted into hiring plans and onboarding plans to ensure there is adequate staff available when the demand occurs in the contact center. Another aspect of workforce planning is more near term, typically around 4-6 weeks into the future. Exact numbers of employees required are calculated then fed into the scheduling solution to ensure coverage for every 30-minute interval during that day. This forecast is done at the “contact-type” level where “contact-type” can refer to any logical grouping of interactions being sent to a specific group of employees in the contact center. Examples might be based on language, product, or other skills that employees have. More sophisticated workforce planning will automatically recalculate the required number of employees after every 30 minutes and compare that number with the number working to show any positive or negative difference, which flags overstaffing and understaffing scenarios. Accurate Forecasts The real benefit of workforce planning is in the accuracy. An accurate plan means that you are hiring and scheduling the “right” number of employees in every situation. Hiring too many is wasting budget and having too few hurts customer service. NICE leverages sophisticated artificial intelligence to ensure best-in-class accuracy of forecasts. Scheduling and Intraday Management But workforce planning is only the first part of the process. The required number of employees is used by the scheduling process to generate when employees are working. This is a very complex stage, as it needs to balance labor laws, business rules, vacations, employee availability, and employee preferences with the requirement while also not scheduling too many employees or having to pay overtime. Proper scheduling results in employees that benefit from more work/life balance and the business having the coverage they need to service their customers. The last part of the process is referred to as Intraday Management and is used to ensure the day is performing against plan. It is used to monitor if employees are working as per the schedule and if the demand is matching the prediction from the forecast. Changes are managed in real-time to ensure good service. The ultimate benefit of workforce management is that the end customers are being taken care of according to plan, thus reducing customer churn. In addition, the employees are also being taken care of, thus reducing employee churn. This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of NICE – View the Original Article For more information about NICE - visit the NICE Website About NICE NICE is a leading global enterprise software provider that enables organizations to improve customer experience and business results, ensure compliance and fight financial crime. Their mission is to help customers build and strengthen their reputation by uncovering customer insight, predicting human intent and taking the right action to improve their business. Read other posts by NICE Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper. Author: NICE Published On: 21st Nov 2019 - Last modified: 17th Apr 2024 Read more about - Business Insights, Intraday, NICE, Scheduling, Workforce Management (WFM) Recommended Articles Workforce Planning: 20 Fundamental Rules Workforce Management Guide 18 Workforce Management Case Studies When Building Your Workforce Planning Model, Don’t Do It Alone Related Reports eBook: Cut Contact Center Costs Without Straining Employees Report: The State of the Market for Workforce Engagement Solutions eBook: Hit Business Goals, Engage Agents, and Delight Customers eBook: Break Outdated WFM Paradigms Contact Centre Reports, Surveys and White Papers Get the latest exciting call centre reports, specialist whitepapers and interesting case-studies. Choose the content that you want to receive. Contact Centre Reports, Surveys and White Papers Invites to exclusive Webinars & Events Weekly Newsletter