Workforce Management Processes: 3, 2, 1 … Contact Center

Customer contact centers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex operations. As well as meeting changing customer service requirements, they also have to control costs and use resources efficiently. Robust Workforce Management (WFM) processes provide a way to meet all these requirements.

WFM tools have changed significantly in the past 20 years – but the pace of evolution is now increasing, as vendors strive to satisfy market demand, particularly from top-tier contact centers. Our recent client experience suggests that significant opportunities are now emerging for WFM vendors in a number of areas.

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Contact centers today raise more complex resourcing challenges than ever before. Teams of Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) based in different locations (in-shore and off-shore), and with different skill-sets, must be skillfully managed to ensure service requests are handled effectively.

To address these issues, contact centers in recent years have been implementing robust Workforce Management (WFM) processes. These streamline the iterative cycle that runs from demand forecasting to the creation of individual agent shift patterns, then through performance monitoring and reporting, and finally back to forecasting. The more complex the center, the more vital the WFM application to its ability to perform effectively (see illustration):

WFM software tools, which first appeared on the market in the 1980s, have now evolved into integrated suites with capabilities covering all stages of the WFM cycle. Today, these applications help call centers to forecast workloads across all contact channels, predict staffing requirements and create agent schedules. They also handle other key functions such as real-time intra-day monitoring and performance reporting.

Various indicators − including the level of market penetration and consolidation of the vendor community − suggest that WFM applications have reached maturity. As a result, WFM vendors are now expanding their offering from WFM packages to unified Workforce Optimization (WFO) suites covering six main areas – Contact Center Performance Management, Interaction Recording, Quality Management, IVR Surveying, E-Learning and Workforce Management.

While WFM has come a long way, we believe its evolution is now stepping up to a new level. The current generation WFM tools often fall short of the increasingly complex requirements of today’s contact centers. With the advance to WFO, there is a major opportunity for those vendors that can address these needs quickly and effectively.

There are two key challenges that now confront contact centers – and these will dictate the way WFM vendors evolve their offerings. These challenges are:

The Forecasting Challenge

Despite their sophistication, many WFM applications struggle to cope with dynamic business environments characterized by fluctuating customer demand. They often have algorithms that use historical call data without taking account of the routing details, even though this may change several times a day. Other important inputs to the forecasting process include events affecting workload such as advertising campaigns, but these often have to be configured manually. Some WFM still rely on ‘Erlang’ models, even though these have proved to be inadequate and too simplistic for dynamic skills-based and activity-based routing environments.

The Self-service Challenge – is it Worth it?

More recent versions of WFM applications include self-service features such as web portals. These allow agents to enter future scheduling preferences, bid for shifts, or swap shifts with other CSRs. These features are designed to limit attrition among the agent workforce and increase employee satisfaction, working on the principle that every 1% increase in CSR satisfaction levels raises customer satisfaction by 0.53 percent.

However, agent churn is not a significant factor for some call center organizations − especially those that handle low value-add work, where highly-skilled CSRs are unnecessary and recruitment costs are moderate. These organizations tend to use highly-centralized governance models, with an Operations Management (OM) department owning the planning process and assuming full responsibility for forecasting and staffing.

Unfortunately for these organizations, most WFM suites are marketed as bundled solutions covering the whole WFM cycle. Also, the key drivers of the pricing calculation tend to be the number of agents in the application database, or the number of FTEs handled by the scheduling process. This means that centralized organizations with 2,000-plus low-skilled agents are being asked to invest in WFM systems and processes that include applications they will never use.

WFM/WFO vendors need to take account of these challenges. In particular, they should address the forecasting challenge by developing and integrating the business modeling capabilities needed to capture all the complexities of the call routing and queuing process.

Of course, forecasting is a blend of art and science, calling for both judgment calls and quantitative analysis. But there is little point in vendors claiming to offer ‘flexible and adaptable scheduling features‘ if forecasted volumes are subject to error margins of 20-30 percent against actual figures.

Here are three useful approaches that vendors should consider, and that call centers might decide to look for in evaluating WFM/WFO products and systems:

• Introduce a simulation engine that uses the forecasted whole traffic as an input, before reproducing the call center’s dynamic behavior and, ultimately, predicting the distribution of calls through sites and services.
  
  
• Evolve the forecasting engine towards data analysis, helping to make forecasts more reliable. To do this, vendors should embed statistical and analytical engines into their WFM offerings, helping their contact center clients to gain thorough insights into past volume patterns and estimate the impact of events on workloads. These evolved forecasting processes would use dynamic simulations in combination with robust, statistics-based workload predictions. The increased insight would also help clients’ reengineering their processes to improve efficiency.
  
  
• Investigate the potential for developing and marketing “light” solutions, focused on delivering self-service capabilities supporting only forecasting and staffing. These solutions would suit highly-centralized organizations, leaving the larger 360-degree offerings to cater to the full spectrum of top-end contact center needs.

Vito Caradonio, is a senior executive, Alfredo Arpaia, senior manager, and Ernesto Ziccardi, senior consultant, all work for Accenture’s Communications & High tech practice.