The WFM Manifesto

Regardless of the particular product or service supported by any contact center, customers expect three main things:

• Customers expect their contacts (i.e. calls, e-mails, chat sessions) to be answered quickly.

• Customers expect to deal with somebody with enough skill to respond to their needs.

• Customers expect cheerful, motivated, and responsive interaction.

Hitting that sweet-spot of cost-driven operational improvements and excellence in service quality is what workforce management (WFM) is all about, and in order for WFM to be a successful endeavor, its presence needs not only to empower managers, but individual agents as well. Sounds like common sense, does it not? Surprisingly, this is more of a guerrilla mindset than one would think. With WFM processes, tools, and technology focused on agent empowerment and customer experience, the most significant challenges facing contact center managers today become solvable, simple problems. A robust and effective WFM implementation should:

Achieve Accurate Forecasting

The root of contact center success is an ability to consistently meet both short-term and long-term goals. Workforce management provides the insight necessary for contact centers to build comprehensive plans by first providing accurate forecasts of contact volume and resource requirements.

It is crucial that organizations get this right, because even small variations from the plan can have a tremendous impact on the performance of the center. The most accurate forecasts automatically account for recent daily trends as well as historical volumes, seasonal trends and expected contact handling times, while appropriately minimizing the impact of anomalies.

Enable Perpetual Intraday Excellence

You need to understand, and remind yourself constantly that the contact center operates continuously, and that continuous excellence is required. Complacency is an expensive proposition. Achieving targets on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis means nothing if customers are falling through the cracks; every abandoned call represents direct impact to revenue and customer loyalty for the company.

Improving the customer experience requires more than simply enabling optimal schedules. Companies must avail of technology that enables the immediate impact assessment of schedule adjustments, and allows for flexible changes to be made on a moment's notice. The flexibility to make scheduling changes with rapid precision, down to the quarter-hour is a necessity. These rapid changes allow contact centers to quickly arrange overtime with agents already present during heavy contact volumes or save unnecessary expenses by sending people home on unusually quiet days.

Even in situations where a change in schedule is not necessary, real-time adherence monitoring allows coaches and supervisors to take immediate action when agent adherence or customer service levels fall below the target, or to exploit opportunities for additional coaching and training events. Rather than waiting for yesterday's report which merely tells you a problem existed, managers can intervene to resolve the difficulties agents are experiencing and bring the center back into compliance on a real-time basis. These strategic decisions must be supported with ongoing, real-time analysis, monitoring the impact of intraday staffing decisions; this will ensure that such decisions can be made with greater accuracy and certainty each time.

Co-ordinate a Multi-Skill Contact Center

Hold on to your hats; explaining this could prove to be complicated, but don't under-estimate this important aspect for one second. Effectively co-ordinating a multi-skill center is the backbone of first-contact resolution and overall cost-containment. In the real world, scheduling agents based on expertise can be difficult because many agents will have different levels of mastery over a wide range of customer contact drivers and service topics. A holistic view of the multi-skilled agent population is imperative.

You need to be able to accurately forecast demand based on the required skills to handle each contact driver, and then allocate agent availability that is proportionally balanced to put the right amount of talent into the right contact queues. By doing so, you can ensure that more customers will reach appropriately skilled agents on the first attempt, decreasing operating costs, and increasing net promoter scores and agent satisfaction.

You can't do this using MS Excel. You have to spend money to make it--or prevent losing it through substandard service and poor first-contact resolution, so start looking into investing in a workforce management technology solution that is the right fit for your organization.

Empower Agents Through Self-Service Capacity

Giving agents control over their destiny can pay tremendous dividends. Not only will agents see themselves as a key long-term component of your strategy, but better morale leads to greater productivity and a more pleasant experience for customers.

WFM should never be allowed to be misconstrued as dictatorial. If that happens, your implementation is misguided and you have deviated from the path of agent empowerment as a means of achieving customer service excellence. WFM should provide agents with the ability to input their preferences, request vacations and facilitate schedule trades with little management intervention.

Self-service tools should also include agent performance tracking, allowing agents to view their performance compared to goals and to peer groups. Make sure to augment this functionality with proper education and interaction with agents and supervisors to ensure purpose and objectives are clear and harmonic.

In empowered environments, agents will feel like partners to change implementation, rather than merely tactical targets of change. They will better-comprehend their impact on the objectives and vision of the contact center operation, and will inherently take ownership over making such objectives a perpetual and successful reality.

Eliminate Conflicts Pertaining to Service Level Ownership

Who owns, and is ultimately accountable for service level performance? Aside from start-up companies I have worked with, where I had the opportunity to build a WFM structure from scratch with complete autonomy, I have seen in every contact center operation a conflict pertaining to the overarching authority over service level performance between operations and workforce management professionals.

WFM is responsible for accurate forecasting, recruitment planning, scheduling of existing staff, and intraday optimization; supervisors and managers are responsible for execution on that guidance, the quality of customer interaction, and the career development of their agents.

By satisfying these group-specific objectives that are unique and only mildly connected, and striving for targets that are completely within each group's scope of control, you eliminate conflict, yet achieve a collective contribution to overall service excellence.

The only sure-fire way to differentiate yourself from your competitors in this day and age is by beating the pants off of your competitors when it comes to providing service and support. An effective WFM implementation is imperative in the pursuit of this lofty goal, and will help you address all three requirements each and every customer has – to be helped quickly, knowledgeably and with passion.

If you and your organization wish to discuss ways to either improve upon an existing WFM implementation, or opportunities to introduce an implementation from scratch, leave a comment below, or write to me at georgexourafas@gmail.com. Good luck!