What New Paradigms Are Changing Workforce Management?

The nature of work has changed, and traditional workforce management (WFM) paradigms have to give way to a whole new concept of what work is and how it is assigned.

Call centers looking to meet the new requirements of an increasingly flexible blended digital office are taking a new approach to workforce management.

5 Key Principles Of WFM In Today’s Digital World

1) Everything Has Changed For Omnichannel Environments

The workplace today bears little resemblance to that of a few years ago. The pandemic changed employee and consumer behaviours across generations, making tech-savvy New Generation X and Boomers just as likely as their younger counterparts to use asynchronous channels like chat or messaging of text.

This affects more than just the way people communicate at work (nearly half of customer service leaders recently surveyed by Salesforce indicated that the number of support channels agents use has increased in the past two years), but also the way they communicate in their spare time. At the same time, an increase in remote work has transformed the way contact centers manage workforce and customer contacts alike.

2) Bots Are Becoming More Popular

Companies are increasingly using bots to handle simple customer inquiries, which means more complex inquiries fall to agents. This often translates into longer call times, and consequently new complexities in WFM processes: this presents a challenge for teams using traditional workforce management solutions, which work best when the Average Handle Time (AHT) is shorter than the planning interval.

3) Agents Must Report The Activity Before Ending The Interaction With The Customer

Planning and anticipating in an environment where interactions are increasingly digital requires that WFM teams stop waiting for contact to end and start reporting when activity occurs (for example, when an agent responds to a social media post) and also when a contact becomes active again (for example, when the customer follows up their social post with a direct message to the business). This will allow WFM teams to plan and forecast based on interval-specific activity patterns, not just the number of contacts and the interval in which a contact ends.

4) Planning And Scheduling Of Work

There is a growing recognition that if you really want to combine different work elements, whether it is from the digital office in the call center or the back office in the customer service center, planning is necessary to understand what work needs to be done regardless of where it takes place. While planning and forecasting can often be done on a daily basis, call centers are more sensitive to the 15 or 30-minute window because they need to deliver consistently good service every window of every day.

5) Schedules Must Cover Staffing Requirements Based On Work Items And Activities

Workforce management is in the midst of a transition from being call or work item based to being activity based. By looking at not only how many work items are received, but also how many are activated at each interval, each item can be turned into the activity required to complete it. This gives companies the ability to generate activity-based staffing requirements.