What Is WFM?

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Alex O’Donovan at Business Systems, Paul Turner at Genesys, and Nikki Quinn at Playvox explain what workforce management (WFM) is in the contact centre.

What Is WFM?

Alex O’Donovan (Business Systems)

Alex O’Donovan

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.

Paul Turner (Genesys)

Paul Turner

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.

Nikki Quinn (Playvox)

Nikki Quinn

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

What Is WFM?

What Is WFM?

Alex O’Donovan (Business Systems)

Paul Turner (Genesys)

Nikki Quinn (Playvox)

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