The variety and the sheer number of communication channels and departments present genuine challenges for contact centre staffing, training, quality monitoring, and streamlining work.
Many organisations lack consistent visibility into the various forms of work, the people available to act on the job, and the processes used. In this environment, balancing workload, staffing, and other resources across functional areas can be critical for delivering effective customer service. Doing it well requires systems that actively collect data about the channels, work, and employee
performance. Analysing and acting on that data is the key to success, enabling continuous improvement in cross-departmental workload, staffing, and outcomes.
Workforce Management (WFM) provides unified applications explicitly designed to help organisations gain visibility into – and more effectively manage – the work they perform, the activities of people who perform it and the processes used to accomplish it. The solution offers a single view of employees, including their own skills, proficiencies, rank, and availability, to handle the workload. By leveraging this information, you can quickly align your workforce with your workload to increase operational efficiencies and deliver a more consistent customer experience.
The variety and the sheer number of communication channels and departments present genuine challenges for contact centre staffing, training, quality monitoring, and streamlining work.
Many organisations lack consistent visibility into the various forms of work, the people available to act on the job, and the processes used. In this environment, balancing workload, staffing, and other resources across functional areas can be critical for delivering effective customer service. Doing it well requires systems that actively collect data about the channels, work, and employee performance. Analysing and acting on that data is the key to success, enabling continuous improvement in cross-departmental workload, staffing, and outcomes.
Workforce Management (WFM) provides unified applications explicitly designed to help organisations gain visibility into – and more effectively manage – the work they perform, the activities of people who perform it and the processes used to accomplish it. The solution offers a single view of employees, including their own skills, proficiencies, rank, and availability, to handle the workload. By leveraging this information, you can quickly align your workforce with your workload to increase operational efficiencies and deliver a more consistent customer experience.

Benefits

Boost productivity

  • Dramatically reduce the time and effort associated with creating, managing and communicating schedules.
  • Empower front-line agents and supervisors by offering self-service options.
  • Create optimised schedules while taking into numerous variables. Pool resources across departments and align incoming work, backlog, and activity types with employee skills and schedules.
  • Manage shrinkage better by using advanced adherence exception management.

Increase operational visibility

  • Provide end-to-end process visibility and optimisation through dashboards and extensive reporting capabilities. All parts of the organisation can now have insight into who’s doing what, when, and for how long.
  • Plan and budget – quickly evaluate different what-if scenarios using agent profiles and performance metrics.
  • Uncover valuable, previously undiscovered information for faster, improved decision-making.

Achieve service levels while reducing operational cost

  • Proactively identify and quickly adapt to daily variations using configurable alerts.
  • Quickly schedule overtime or voluntary time off to correct for under or overstaffing situations.
  • Build the most cost-effective schedules using the skills, proficiencies and quality scores of each agent.
  • Manage shrinkage better through using advanced adherence exception management.
  • Schedule across all channels while maximising capacity and minimising cost.
  • Deliver a consistent customer experience that can be managed holistically across multiple touch points and channels.

Improve the employee work experience

Self-service options, fair shifts, shift swap, time off etc. all contribute to a greater degree of agent autonomy. This will lead to drops in attrition rates and absenteeism while maintaining a higher employee retention rate.

Enable strategic planning for the long term

The strategic planner tool enables business users to quickly evaluate various future scenarios and prepare for seasonal variations well in advance.

Simplify compliance-related  activities

Easily maintain specific records to prove compliance to various governmental bodies or parent organisations.

Challenges

Effectively manage contact centre schedules

It can be difficult to effectively manage and optimise contact centre staffing schedules across multiple channels and skill levels without the right tools.

Staffing inefficiencies

Inefficiencies in staffing directly affect your bottom line. Overstaffing increases labour costs and decreases productivity, while understaffing can lead to high attrition rates, poor service and a decrease in revenue.

Insufficient insight into agent activity

Supervisors and workforce administrators often do not have visibility into real-time agent activities and schedule adherence.

Balancing contact centre agent needs

Contact centre agents expect flexibility around when, where and how long they work, yet it is a challenge to balance these needs with those of your customers and business.

Key features

Create and communicate optimised schedules that are fully customisable.

Optimise these forecasts and schedules with a built-in scheduling algorithm that effortlessly takes into account a myriad of intertwined variables:

Ensure that agents adhere to schedules and manage exceptions through dashboards and automated notifications. Actual adherence figures can then be used to determine future forecasts and schedules.

Staff according to interaction specific goals or outcomes such as: service levels, average speed to answer, quality goals, deadline goals, dials per hour, right party connects and more. In addition, priorities can be set to specific interaction channels to provide more control over service levels and staffing requirements.

A deep level of integration with other modules such as performance management, quality management, speech analytics, e-learning, coaching (and more) future-proofs the solution against changing requirements and creates scope for additional enhancements.

Scheduling takes all channels, tasks and interactions into account. If you have a contract with an outsourcer for some of your calls, for example, the solution also lets you co-ordinate schedules with them. Training, meetings and events can also be intelligently scheduled to minimise the impact of these activities on your service levels.

Enable employees to manage their schedules on the go through a mobile app. Many requests can be automatically handled without administrator or supervisor authorisation/intervention too.

Assign your skilled, most productive agents to work during peak periods. This enables you to reduce costs by deploying fewer resources.

Allow employees with schedule conflicts to trade shifts with a co-worker to simplify schedule changes and increase workplace flexibility.

Configure and manage voluntary time off (VTO) and overtime (OT) together with shift rules and other work patterns.

Prioritise how agents spend their time by factoring in the volume and age of work in the backlog when making decisions.

Enable employees to request time off and make-up time in a single request.

Easily create and view tactical forecasts per campaign (based on historical data) with the click of a button.

A simple browser-based interface and familiar navigation ensures quick uptake and minimal training requirements for agents, supervisors and managers.

Key features

Create and communicate optimised schedules that are fully customisable.

Optimise these forecasts and schedules with a built-in scheduling algorithm that effortlessly takes into account a myriad of intertwined variables:

Ensure that agents adhere to schedules and manage exceptions through dashboards and automated notifications. Actual adherence figures can then be used to determine future forecasts and schedules.

Staff according to interaction specific goals or outcomes such as: service levels, average speed to answer, quality goals, deadline goals, dials per hour, right party connects and more. In addition, priorities can be set to specific interaction channels to provide more control over service levels and staffing requirements.

A deep level of integration with other modules such as performance management, quality management, speech analytics, e-learning, coaching (and more) future-proofs the solution against changing requirements and creates scope for additional enhancements.

Scheduling takes all channels, tasks and interactions into account. If you have a contract with an outsourcer for some of your calls, for example, the solution also lets you co-ordinate schedules with them. Training, meetings and events can also be intelligently scheduled to minimise the impact of these activities on your service levels.

Enable employees to manage their schedules on the go through a mobile app. Many requests can be automatically handled without administrator or supervisor authorisation/intervention too.

Assign your skilled, most productive agents to work during peak periods. This enables you to reduce costs by deploying fewer resources.

Allow employees with schedule conflicts to trade shifts with a co-worker to simplify schedule changes and increase workplace flexibility.

Configure and manage voluntary time off (VTO) and overtime (OT) together with shift rules and other work patterns.

Prioritise how agents spend their time by factoring in the volume and age of work in the backlog when making decisions.

Enable employees to request time off and make-up time in a single request.

Easily create and view tactical forecasts per campaign (based on historical data) with the click of a button.

A simple browser-based interface and familiar navigation ensures quick uptake and minimal training requirements for agents, supervisors and managers.

Calculating ROI

A single digit percentage improvement in productivity, adherence, etc. typically results in an ROI in 8 to 16 months. This does not take into consideration non-tangible benefits such as an increase in customer experience or employee satisfaction.

An ROI can be built in minutes using some or all of the following areas of improvement:

01

Improved agent productivity through enhanced schedule adherence, better agent utilisation/increased capacity and decreased shrinkage.

02

Enhanced supervisor and WFM Manager productivity through less time spent on administration and routine tasks, and an increase in forecasting and scheduling efficiency.