What is workforce management in a contact center?

First, let’s begin with a simple contact center workforce management definition. Contact or call center workforce management (WFM) is when a company organizes staff and allocates resources to ensure optimal operational productivity. It has to consider several elements, such as agent availability, compliance with industry regulations, and budget limitations.

Contact centers are often complex working environments. Responding to customer needs effectively takes meticulous planning and adapting quickly and flexibly to unexpected changes. All of these factors make efficient WFM fundamental to the long-term success of your contact center.

The key elements of contact center workforce management

You can break down the individual aspects of workforce management for contact center operations into four sections — forecasting, scheduling, agent assignment, and intraday management.

Forecasting

The volume of calls and messages a contact center receives doesn’t stay constant over time. It ebbs and flows according to several factors, including time of day, day of the week, and seasonality.

One of the most important tasks in contact center WFM is accurately forecasting demand. If you don’t have enough staff on a particular shift, customers will have to wait longer to get a response and won’t be happy.

On the other hand, if you significantly overestimate how many agents you’ll need during slower periods, you’ll add unnecessarily to your labor costs – which can significantly impact the bottom line over time.

To get it right, use historical data to establish call and message volume trends across all channels. Ideally, you should create and review your forecasts regularly so you can adapt them quickly as needed.

Scheduling

Once you’ve established your forecasts, the next step is to schedule shifts. How many agents will you need to work during each time period? Are there individual tasks that will need specialist staff to cover?

Set out detailed schedules that list how many staff will be needed to cover each one, according to the call/message volume forecasts.

Agent assignment

Then, it’s time to assign individual agents to each shift. Effective call center management depends on getting the right people to work the right shifts. Take into account each employee’s skill set and general availability. You’ll also need to check the current approved vacation schedule to avoid mistakenly assigning agents who won’t be there.

Intraday management

There’s a chaos element to workforce management, meaning no matter how well you plan, you must be ready to cope with surprises in the moment.

For instance, if an agent is absent due to sickness, you need to be ready to get someone else to cover their shift. Or there may simply be a sudden surge in call volume you weren’t expecting.

Having a pool of reserve agents to call on can help in this scenario. Building some flexibility into your schedule planning is vital so you can respond when the unexpected occurs.

The benefits of effective workforce management: Why it’s important in your contact center

With effective workforce management, contact centers benefit from many key advantages. Here’s an overview of some of the biggest ones.

Time and cost savings

First, instituting well-planned WFM policies saves time and money. That’s because when you allocate your resources efficiently, you get the most out of them.

Optimizing the schedule and tracking agent work time properly both serve to keep labor costs down and make the best use of everyone’s time. You’ll likely see a drop in average hold times and an accompanying increase in customer satisfaction.

Improved efficiency

When you arrange contact center schedules on an ad hoc basis, inefficiencies can creep in. You may find overstaffing and understaffing become a problem if you’re not managing your available resources effectively.

However, a systematic approach using proper WFM initiatives ensures that your customers always receive prompt service. You’ll see the benefit in key metrics like first-call resolution rates and average handling time.

Greater agent engagement 

Not only does this keep your customers happy, but it also does wonders for agent morale. An efficiently managed workforce is much less likely to suffer from overload, so productivity increases and agents are more engaged.

In addition, allocating time efficiently allows you to invest more in providing training and coaching to your staff. And when you offer your agents opportunities to upskill, they feel valued and more secure in their roles. It’s the ultimate virtuous circle.

Enhanced customer experience (CX)

All of this translates into a vastly superior customer experience. Customers contacting your organization want their issues resolved as quickly as possible. They don’t want to be held in a call queue for half an hour or wait days for a response on social media.

Effective WFM ensures you have enough agents with the right skill set to help your customers in the channel of their choice. It’s the best way to ensure your customers’ needs are met and projects exactly the professional image that can elevate your brand above the competition.

Contact center workforce management software: How it can help you

So, let’s talk about how practical workforce management solutions can help you improve your WFM process.

Improving forecasting and scheduling

Accurate forecasting is the crucial foundation upon which any effective WFM process is based. Without a good grasp of how many agents you’ll need to cover a particular shift, you won’t be able to create schedules that work.

Unfortunately, it’s not always straightforward to discern the underlying call volume trends. For instance, you may know that more customers tend to get in touch on Fridays, so you’d prepare by scheduling more staff that day. But suppose you operate a contact center for a retailer, and Black Friday is coming up. How will this affect call volumes? You might expect a higher surge than usual that Friday, but how do you quantify it?

This is where automated WFM software comes into its own. It applies advanced analytics to historical data and customer behavior to forecast message volumes more accurately than a human researcher can.

Encouraging schedule adherence

Another terrific benefit of WFM software is that it can track adherence to schedules in real time. It monitors the status of your agents throughout the shift, so you always know who is active and who isn’t.

With these agent status statistics constantly available, you can adjust schedules as needed to maintain your service-level targets. Since your staff knows their activity is monitored, they’ll carefully adhere to the schedules.

For instance, you can set many tools like this to notify you if one of your agents has worked so long that they’re about to enter a period of unscheduled overtime.

Although there may be occasions when this is unavoidable, it shouldn’t become a regular habit. If too many of your staff are doing this, it can increase your cost base and undermine morale. In other words, it’s a sign you may need to recruit more agents, and WFM software can alert you to the fact before it becomes a problem.

Promoting greater agent morale

Let’s go into more depth on the question of agent morale. Generally speaking, employees with more control over their work lives tend to be happier. In turn, this translates into higher levels of agent engagement and productivity.

WFM software often comes with tools that empower your agents to take control of their work schedules. For example, your agents can edit their schedules to change their work hours, move lunch breaks to a different time, and so on. This is possible because the system automatically adapts the general schedule to fit agent availability, maintaining the service level required.

Another option for agents is using the WFM software to enable shift swapping. Instead of manually arranging a shift swap, they can do it automatically, with no need for approval from a supervisor.

Not only does this free up your managers to focus on more important tasks, but it’s also great news for your agents’ work-life balance. The result? A happier, more motivated workforce.

Providing accurate real-time insights

Effective intraday management can be a challenge. Ensuring all channels are covered adequately while not overcommitting resources is a tricky balance in a busy contact center. That’s particularly true when call and message volume patterns don’t meet expectations.

What you need to address this is reliable data. You want access to continuously updated information about schedule adherence and customer behavior. Then, you can use this information to arrive at actionable insights and make data-driven decisions that help optimize your workflows.

This is another great strength of WFM software. It can also track agents’ adherence to the current schedule, monitor many other vital metrics, and notify your team if they need to make any adjustments. Overall, this helps you maintain optimal customer service levels while deploying all your resources as efficiently as possible.

Increasing productivity and cutting costs

In short, workforce management software helps you run a tighter ship. It drives down costs because you cut out waste.

You can optimize schedules effectively because you have more reliable forecasts of call and message volumes. As advanced analytics provide real-time trend data, those schedules can be adapted throughout each shift.

This means you can do more with less. Rather than rostering extra staff just in case they’re needed, you can determine exactly how many staff should be on shift and on-call at any time.

What’s more, this flexibility enables you to offer your agents more freedom to arrange their work schedules in a way that best suits them. The system automatically adjusts the schedule to keep customer service availability unchanged.

The result is a boost to productivity coming from two directions: by optimizing the allocation of resources and by increasing motivation and engagement in your workforce.

How to find the right contact center workforce management tools for you

Various contact center workforce management tools are out there, and it’s important to research to find the best fit for your organization. Here, we run through a few factors you should consider before deciding.

1. Understand the needs of your contact center

First, it’s crucial to determine the needs of your contact center. Think about:

• Workforce size: How many agents do you currently employ, and how do you expect that figure to change over time? Selecting a solution that will scale easily is vital if you're in a growth phase.

• System integrations: Which tools will you need your workforce management software to work alongside? Finding one with the appropriate integrations out of the box is best.

• Accessibility: Evaluating ease of use before implementing your WFM platform is key. It should be straightforward enough to work with so your staff can adapt quickly.

2. Define a budget

No contact center workforce management software comparison would be complete without a mention of cost. Yes, WFM software adds operational expense to the list — but the key point to remember is that it saves money in the long run.

That’s thanks to the efficiencies it helps your business achieve. Given that contact centers are labor-intensive, your agents can account for a significant proportion of your total costs. WFM software enables you to deploy those human resources as effectively as possible.

The good news is that the cost of a WFM platform is fairly predictable. They’re generally charged on a per-user, per-month basis. The exact amount varies according to how many features you want, but you should always be able to set a budget and find a solution that fits the bill.

3. Find a WFM tool that gives you the best ROI

Overall, the aim is to opt for a solution that gives you the best return on your investment. This means it’s a question of finding a tool that meets the needs of your contact center while minimizing the cost.

But don’t forget that there are second-order effects here. If you forgo some of the more advanced features on grounds of cost, could that have a detrimental impact on performance further down the line?

On the other hand, if you only need a basic WFM solution for a small contact center, it could be overkill to go for very high-end functionality. Ultimately, it comes down to the precise needs of your organization.

Easily integrate contact center workforce management solutions with Vonage Contact Center

If you use Vonage Contact Center, you can gain access to integrated workforce software solutions from a number of our partners. These are ideal for optimizing omnichannel support and helping you meet your service level goals, no matter how large or small your business.

For instance, with Vonage Contact Center and Calabrio WFM working together, you can streamline your team’s workflows by building schedules with rules-based automation. You’ll also be able to take advantage of dynamic intraday scheduling tools to fine-tune your schedule in real time.

Alternatively, you could look at how Vonage Contact Center and Verint WFM work well with your Salesforce CRM. You can pull omnichannel data from your servers and your Salesforce account for analysis, meaning you’ll benefit from even more accurate forecasting.

Whatever your organization’s workforce management needs, we’re here to help you find the most effective solution. If you’d like to know more about how using a single, pre-integrated platform that seamlessly connects your WFM and telephony platforms can benefit your business, simply reach out to a Vonage expert today to schedule a demo.