Workforce Management Redefined
1 May, 2004
By: Rick Glew,William DurrWe have witnessed phenomenal change over the past 20 years in nearly every human endeavor except one: contact center workforce management (WFM) systems.
WFM is the code word for forecasting and scheduling. Although the boundaries of forecasting and scheduling have slowly crept outward to include full-time equivalent long-range planning and agent self-service for shift swaps and time off, the scope of competitive WFM solutions remains amazingly constrained and narrow. In fact, the very name we apply to these systems points to the glaring deficiency inherent in them. Workforce management—forecasting and scheduling—is actually all about deploying human resources.
Leading expert Peter Drucker says that management is much more complex than telling people when to go on a break. Instead, it’s about leading people to achieve a group goal by capitalizing on their strengths, minimizing their weaknesses and developing the specific strengths and knowledge of each employee. Nowhere is the need for real management and decision support tools greater than in 21st-century contact centers. This can be proved by admitting that even if we had perfect forecasts, schedules and adherence, frontline management teams would still face mountains of problems and issues. These problems and issues all flow from the oppositional interplay between business objectives, center costs and employee satisfaction.
To address these issues, Blue Pumpkin has released its Workforce Optimization Suite, Version 4.5 with three key elements; long-range planning, workforce management redefined for 21st-century requirements and performance management. These components can be implemented as individual, stand-alone solutions, or as a fully integrated and interoperating suite that eliminates interface issues, multiple administration points and multiple vendor relationship management. The Workforce Optimization Suite provides necessary decision-support tools that, when used together, enable a contact center to “Manage to Excellence” by incorporating performance considerations into everything that goes on in the center.
Blue Pumpkin Planner is a long-range strategic planning solution that uses simulation to answer tough planning problems. With Planner, center analysts can determine the payback from cross-training, take into account agent learning curves to determine critical hiring dates and avoid being trapped by unplanned budget constraints.
Blue Pumpkin’s Workforce Management solution is totally re-engineered to address the tough operational issues facing contact center management teams today. Forecasting and scheduling precision reaches new heights owing to greater flexibility in the creation of forecast profiles and consideration for individual agent proficiency within each skill. This unmatched combination of functionality helps to eliminate the service level variability from half-hour to half-hour that causes management teams to remain locked in crisis management mode. Additionally, activity management and time collection capabilities are available. By clearly understanding how agents are spending their work-days, including project and back-office work, center management is better able to handle costs.
This redefinition of WFM includes the concept of productivity management using powerful key performance indicators (KPIs) endorsed by Gartner Measurement. Providing agents, team leaders, supervisors and managers with clear objectives, timely feedback on performance and an industry benchmarking capability removes all performance ambiguities and focuses everyone on excellence.
Combining elements of three previously separated sets of functionality into the new definition of workforce management creates a virtual closed-loop of employee deployment, employee activity tracking and employee performance improvement. This powerful combination ensures that your team is efficiently deployed and is continually improving in their ability to meet customer expectations.
The last element of the suite is performance management for productivity and effectiveness. Blue Pumpkin Advisor can be implemented alongside any ACD or WFM software package. Those systems, together with data from quality monitoring and CRM applications, permit center management to develop individual scorecards benefiting from powerful KPIs created from diverse sources that can drive improvements in productivity and customer satisfaction.
With the release of Workforce Optimization Suite 4.5, a new benchmark in contact center management software has been established. And, only Blue Pumpkin provides an integrated suite of applications and professional services that address all facets of optimization.
Provided by William Durr - Chief Evangelist, Blue Pumpkin
Center Optimization: Pulling It All Together
Now that many contact center managers have successfully implemented workforce management systems to improve scheduling efficiency, there’s a big push to take these efficiencies to the next level. This trend is commonly referred to as “optimization.” In the contact center world, optimization discussions are generally focused on the workforce. Focusing purely on agent performance, however, may be distracting the contact center organization from seeing the bigger picture.
True optimization occurs when technologies work together to influence human behavior and drive performance across all systems and processes in the organization.
Workforce management systems can be one of the contact center’s greatest assets for achieving this level of optimization. WFM systems consolidate disparate information and technologies for one unified solution to optimize people, processes and technology across all elements of the contact center. These include, contact routing infrastructure; human resource, quality monitoring and training systems; and data management/planning processes.
- Contact Routing Optimization - Let’s face it, if the right agent with the right skill isn’t on the other end of the line when a customer calls, the best routing plan is useless. WFM systems help avoid routing mishaps by employing sophisticated multiskill, multisite and multichannel planning, management and analysis applications. These applications work in conjunction with contact routing scripts to ensure agent resources are used efficiently.
- Human Resource Optimization - Having the right number of staff, doing the right things, is critical to an effective operation. HR optimization systems are designed to help improve agent performance for more efficient and effective customer service. WFM systems take the guesswork out of contact center operations and agent performance. This enables contact center managers to make smart decisions. They can drive workforce optimization with agent scorecards that yield performance statistics and standardize interfaces for quality monitoring and eLearning systems.
- Business Process Optimization - Streamlining business processes enables contact centers to function better. WFM systems enable managers to efficiently manage their staff for the best possible service levels on a day-to-day basis. These tools can boost today’s service levels and help plan for the future based on the center’s anticipated needs and available staff. Through this process, WFM users that leverage the full analytical, data management, simulation and planning power of the system will begin to see and correct areas of sub-optimization early in the process. WFM technology can also streamlines processes with single data entry and integration with IVR, HR and payroll systems.
Comprehensive WFM systems, such as TotalView from IEX, span these areas—making them a strong backbone for contact center optimization.
Seamless integration and data exchange can be achieved between TotalView and a host of contact center operations and optimization systems via IEX SmartSync technology. This functionality enables IEX to partner with key, complementary technology providers. Through these partnerships, managers can pick and choose the technology that’s right for them and enjoy seamless integration.
Augmenting WFM technology with performance management and strategic planning tools empowers managers to fully optimize their contact centers. How?
- Performance Management enables data-driven management practices throughout the enterprise so that managers can personalize metrics and information for all roles and levels in the organization. Managers can ensure agents and supervisors take appropriate actions with automated alerts, forms, messages and tasking.
- Strategic Planning allows managers to automatically develop budgets, build staff plans and service quality forecasts as well as build variance analysis and risk assessment reports. This lets managers determine the business impact of changes on staff and infrastructure to pinpoint optimal service levels that will maximize profits.
By building on the WFM system’s core competencies through technology alliances, a best in class, fully integrated optimization package can be easily delivered.
Provided by Rick Glew - Director of Marketing, IEX.
Mid-size Mystery
“Workforce management tools are helpful in all centers, but achieving a favorable ROI can be more difficult in mid-range centers with fewer seats to spread the cost,” says Art Goes, President and Founder of Professional Resource Management, a Palatine, IL based software developer specializing in call center support software for 80-100 seat centers. “Likewise, additional features which add to the cost of WFM software may not be easily justified at first.” He recommends the following considerations for mid-size centers.
The basics. WFM software for a mid-size call center should be able to: capture historical data from the ACD; use history to forecast future workload by month, day and half hour; develop and display agent schedules; staff from the planned schedule to easily adjust to projected workload. Goes says, “ And all schedule adjustments should be intuitive and easy to execute.”
Second tier features. Once the basics are covered, such as agent preferences for shift selection, and calls routing for agent skill sets may come next. Then build add agent adherence to schedule. Additionally, if the ACD has limited reporting capabilities mid-size centers may choose to supplement the data and reports with WFM’s agent performance tracking or historical statistics modules.
