What Concepts Should Be Applied In The Management Of The Workforce Of A Call Center?

For experienced workforce supervisors, predicting the number of calls and planning the agents needed to serve users is a daily task in the day-to-day of a call center.

Workforce management (WFM) programs seek to ensure that contact centers have the necessary number of qualified agents at the right time, either through Excel spreadsheets or using sophisticated WFM software.

The ability to achieve the right mix of personnel has a direct impact on customer service metrics, such as service levels (SLA), average response speed (ASA) and customer satisfaction (CSAT). With people representing 67% of the cost of a call center, appropriate staffing also has a direct impact on operational metrics such as labor cost, as it seeks the perfect balance to meet user demand while avoiding the excess or lack of agents.

WFM activities are reduced to four basic components: forecasting, planning, intraday management and employee engagement.

1) Forecast

Forecasting is the process of analyzing the history of previously received calls to predict future contact volumes on all channels, such as voice, live chat, email, social networks, etc.

Data analysis through Artificial Intelligence (AI) is key to establishing advanced algorithms that help make more accurate forecasts. The best WFM solutions even eliminate the guesswork by ensuring that the best algorithms are applied to your forecast for the data set and the forecast time period. It is important to measure the accuracy of your forecasts on a regular and continuous basis to make appropriate corrections if necessary.

2) Planning

The planning assigns to the appropriate agents to attend the possible calls peaks in each time interval. Without the right technology, programming each schedule can be complicated. This complexity is probably the reason why an ICMI survey in 2018 in more than 600 customer service centers found that less than a third of call centers are “very satisfied” with their existing programming process. It is likely that these contact centers experience the symptoms of a badly established schedule, which may include:

• Not having enough agents to serve users, causing the waiting time and average response speed to skyrocket, and customer service and satisfaction levels plummet.

• Have the wrong agents available to respond to users thanks to their skills or the ability to resolve incoming inquiries.

• Have annoying or uncommitted agents because they were scheduled to work on other dates and times.

Well-programmed schedules ensure the best combination of personnel to meet the demand of users, while balancing operating costs and meeting the demands of agents. The best WFM technology can offer this in minutes, and also take advantage of machine learning to ensure programming becomes smarter every time it runs.

3) Intraday Administration

• Intraday management: You can have the most accurate forecast and the most optimized schedule in the world, but unexpected events can always appear and cause problems. When these things happen, it is best to run a new intraday version and adjust the schedules to cover possible gaps.

• Intraday reprogramming: Currently, WFM team or supervisors manually manage 70% of intra-day problems, but most of the leading WFM software can automate intra-day reprogramming for individual intervals, as well as much of the flow of schedule change work.

• Time changes: Once the settings have been identified, the shifts of the agents can be adapted, depending on the needs. The best WFM solutions can automatically notify agents that they have changed their shifts to ensure that staff is in the right place and at the right time, despite the change in plans.

• Real-time adhesion: Another important intraday activity is measuring and monitoring real-time adhesion (RTA). The RTA is one of the most underrated metrics in the call center, but it is also one of the most important, since it allows you to quickly see what agents should do based on time planning compared to what they are doing in real time. Having this vision allows you to address the problem immediately.

4) Employee commitment

While the activities of forecasting, planning and management of intraday changes and schedules affect the commitment of employees, there are some specific ones that are part of a successful program of workforce management and that directly impacts the loyalty of employees. The way in which leisure time requests or shift change requests are administered, serve as an indicator of how much the agents’ time is valued (both inside and outside the office).

Therefore, it is important that call center supervisors have a process to provide timely responses to these requests.

Most WFM solutions provide a mechanism to track the possibilities of agents’ free time, automatically route requests to a supervisor for approval and provide instant notifications. In some cases, the software can automatically approve the requests according to the rules established by the administrators. Similarly, automating change requests and allowing shifts between peers also offers flexibility to their agents.