A Quick Introduction to WFM

Efficient staffing is essential for delivering great customer service while maintaining a productive workforce.

Workforce Management (WFM) helps contact centres achieve this by ensuring the right people are in place at the right time.

To find out more, we asked Paul Turner, WEM Innovation Lead at Genesys , Nikki Quinn, Senior Solutions Consultant at Playvox, and Alex O’Donovan, WFO Consultant at Business Systems, to explain what workforce management (WFM) is in the contact centre.

Video: What Is WFM?

Watch the video below to hear Paul, Nikki, and Alex define WFM in the contact centre:

With thanks to the following people for contributing to this video:

Paul Turner, WEM Innovation Lead at Genesys
Nikki Quinn, Senior Solutions Consultant at Playvox
Alex O’Donovan, WFO Consultant at Business Systems

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What Is Contact Centre WFM?

Workforce Management is a system that helps organisations manage staffing levels, schedules, and performance, as Alex explains:

“On the surface WFM is a set of procedures, even in Excel, that at first glance allows you to automate and manage your contact centre schedules, and as a result automate a bunch of processes outside that.

However, at a deeper level, what it’s actually doing is managing the interface between your customers and your staff, in order to keep both sets of people at a level of satisfaction of your choosing.

One, by trying to meet your customer-facing service targets, and two by creating optimal schedules within a set of constraints that keep your workforce on-site and happy.”

At its core, WFM ensures that customer service targets are met while keeping employees engaged and satisfied.

It balances customer demand with staff availability, creating efficient schedules within set constraints.

How WFM Works

WFM removes the manual effort and guesswork involved in forecasting customer demand and planning employee schedules.

It enables supervisors to monitor key performance metrics, assess schedule adherence, and make adjustments where necessary.

“Workforce management is a solution designed to remove manual effort and guesswork for those responsible for creating forecasts for customer demand and employee schedules.

You tend to find supervisors will use these tools to monitor performance metrics and perhaps look at those variants to schedule and forecast.

And generally what we see are organizations will have benefits, including improvements to service level, perhaps some operational efficiency and general customer satisfaction improvements, because they tend to have the right resources in the right place to meet that customer demand.” – Paul

This leads to improved service levels, better operational efficiency, and increased customer satisfaction.

The People-Centred Approach

Beyond automation and efficiency, WFM plays a crucial role in employee engagement, as Nikki continues:

“For me, workforce management is all about people, and that’s both the employees and the customers.

It’s a tool to remove those unnecessary, repetitive manual tasks and operational headaches, and it provides insight for change. It should enable agility and enable contact centres to plan effectively.

And then most importantly for me, from a people perspective, it should execute, engage, and empower people, regardless of channel or location to provide an exceptional employee and customer experience.”

By reducing repetitive manual tasks, it allows managers to focus on workforce development and agility.

A well-implemented WFM system not only optimises staffing but also empowers employees to perform at their best, ultimately improving both customer and employee experiences.

If you are looking for more great video insights from the experts, check these out these videos next:

Author: Guest Author
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell

Published On: 16th May 2022 - Last modified: 1st May 2025
Read more about - Video, Business Systems, Editor's Picks, Genesys, Paul Turner, Playvox, Videos, Workforce Management (WFM)