Best Practices for Workforce Management
1 Nov, 2007
By: J. Andrew JudkinsEstablishing an appropriate service-level goal that is not too high or too low is a key consideration in your WFM structure. Hitting service-level goals is always best for the customer while hitting occupancy goals is good for controlling costs. (Occupancy is the percentage of time the agent spends on the phone/e-mail/chat versus total time logged in.) Yet this can be an especially tricky balance when varying conditions hit you when least expected. You need to be prepared to react swiftly in times of urgent need. Systems exist to help you manage the constantly changing needs of your contact center. Leading WFM solutions forecast call volumes and average handle times. Workforce management tools help you forecast demand and produce optimal schedules to meet the demand. Combined, these tools can help you facilitate the process of balancing occupancy with service levels.
BEST PRACTICE #1 – Hire the right agents to gain schedule flexibility and a labor cost advantage. Your most valuable resource is your people, but they are also the most costly, especially with rising labor, benefits, hiring and retention costs. So it makes sense to hire the right agents. Yet, this is easier said than done because your demand for workers can change rapidly. A best practice is to hedge against company demand fluctuations by selecting a flexible workforce – agents who are flexible in the number of hours worked and scheduled work times or even able to work from home. This enables you to adapt to changing needs and hit service-level and occupancy goals. If you can open your hiring pool to at-home agents, you vastly increase your hiring, staffing and wage pool.
BEST PRACTICE #2 – Prescreen the right candidates by testing and screening. Focus on candidates with the best chances for success by testing and screening prior to the interview process. Leverage technology to screen, recruit and interview to maximize hiring efficiency, time to proficiency and agent retention. Your testing process can assess skills such as typing and data entry, audio typing, Windows navigation and business reasoning as well as personality traits and cognitive ability. Utilize the test results to improve short-term and long-term attrition. Help your prospective agents gain a complete understanding of the job by giving them a realistic understanding of the job and your expectations. Remember, you can train agents to be successful, but if they don’t fit, they will quit.
BEST PRACTICE #3 – Make your schedules accessible. Workforce management software can free up hours of a manager’s time while providing agents with easy access to their schedules. Agents should be able to access their schedule anytime via the Internet or an interactive phone system. Because schedules aren’t distributed in hard copy, managers gain more leeway and can make last-minute scheduling changes. Technology exists to allow agents to call in late or sick and the information will automatically be updated to the call center schedule. Agents can access and be notified of their schedules anytime and anywhere while managers have the freedom to make change. Agents can be notified of these changes on their cell phone via text message or voice call, home phone and instant messaging, etc.
BEST PRACTICE #4 – Utilize scheduling simulation. The only way to truly optimize your schedule is to use simulation. Spreadsheets and Erlang calculators are not effective at telling how well you are performing, because they don’t take into consideration agents with multiple skills or skills-based call routing. Therefore, use simulation tools to optimize start, break, and lunch and end times. Identify service-level risks such as over- or under-service level goals and their associated costs. Recognize things like behavior patterns, weekday trends and morning versus evening.
BEST PRACTICE #5 – Reward agents based on satisfaction scores. Measure customer satisfaction by agent and other strategic key performance indicators using a weighted scorecard. By implementing customer feedback surveys, agent performance can be identified and historically benchmarked against your center’s overall performance. Information about your agents’ performance can be used to determine schedule priority. That is, agents with a higher satisfaction-level score will be able to choose their schedule before those with a lower score. As long as this shift bidding is done systematically, this practice will result in a competitive and motivating atmosphere for agents as well as help managers reward good performance.
Most agents are motivated by the opportunity to achieve preferred shift times and priority time-off requests.
BEST PRACTICE #6 – Make it convenient to balance service level with occupancy. Because call centers face the dynamically changing supply and demand curve — much like the manufacturing industry — it is paramount you are able to satisfy demand to handle customer contacts with agent supply. Give your managers the tools they need to efficiently add/subtract staffing levels. For example, you can use an automated instant message, text-message, e-mail and calling system that notifies agents of either a need for extra workers (when demand is higher than expected) or an option for a certain number of workers to skip or shorten a shift (when demand is lower than expected). This automated message should allow for immediate real-time “yes” or “no” response from agents. The schedule and assignments should be automatically adjusted accordingly. This allows managers to run the call center without the stress of seeking additional workers or manually calling agents.
BEST PRACTICE #7 – Understand your service-level needs. To decide what your company’s service level should be, a proper analysis of your industry needs should be done. There exists no magical industry norm or universal service level. Consider the catalog or direct response industry. A customer probably won’t wait five minutes to order, but might wait that long for service help on a new computer. Your service level should reflect your ability and your customers’ expectations. Tracking your service level is imperative, and it’s best to use a solution that enables staffing adjustments to be made quickly. Even though exceeding your established service level might seem beneficial, you could actually be wasting money unnecessarily for your company. If to reach maximum performance your company wants to answer 80 percent of the calls within 30 seconds, and you end up answering 85 percent, that is usually a sign you are staffing (and subsequently paying for) too many agents to sit idle. It likewise spins the other way. If you answer 75 percent of the calls in time, scheduling additional staff, or better utilization of your current staff, should be considered to meet your service level.
BEST PRACTICE #8 – Keep service level versus occupancy in mind. Your WFM solution is essential to successfully balancing quality and cost elements. Achieving a balance between overloading agents because the service level is unattainable and staffing too many idle agents can best be resolved by using a solution that will automatically organize your callers according to skill and adjust calling assignments according to shrinkage and vacation time of agents. Optimizing how much of agents’ time is spent working versus off the phone or waiting for a call can change quite frequently.
BEST PRACTICE #9 – Automatically deliver training to your agents during unexpected idle time. Convert agent idle time into a powerful knowledge-building opportunity for those who need additional training. Monitor your queue levels and compare to agents’ schedules to find short, 15-minute training opportunities. Allow training to be interrupted and resumed when needed. Execute your training using specific content with measurable results.
Managers are responsible for adjusting performance to the ever-changing contact center environment. While each question, challenge or problem requires a specific software or application, it doesn’t have to entail using a different solution for each problem. Here’s something to consider: UCN’s inContact® is an all-in-one suite of core contact-handling applications. In-Contact/Workforce Management delivers an integrated set of tools to help contact centers optimally forecast schedules to match inbound contact demand and to automatically notify employees of schedules and changes. It meets requirements of best practices for automatic schedule updates and electronic shift posting, shift bidding, filling an urgent need, service-level awareness and occupancy balance.
