How Call Centers Are Streamlining Workforce Management

Workforce management (WFM) covers the activities involved in producing a productive, profitable workforce in the contact center. These activities include scheduling, forecasting, performance reviews, attendance records, timekeeping and day-to-day management.

The final item sometimes proves difficult to manage. Call center volume and staffing needs change rapidly, often on a daily basis. But newer technologies like workforce management contact center software and call center business intelligence help. They offer opportunities to improve all WFM activities, thereby lowering labor costs and raising profits. Here’s how.

Agent Scheduling

Call center managers monitor metrics like schedule adherence, first call resolution, average wait time and customer satisfaction. Those numbers inform future schedules. They also guide upcoming trainings because efficiency and productivity improve as agents learn and apply customer service skills.

Business Forecasting for the Contact Center

Workforce management contact center software also aids with business forecasting. This piece of WFM is a lynchpin. Get it wrong and cranky customers and lost revenue are likely. Get it right, and organizations outperform.

• Cost Monitoring: Call monitoring integrations in a modern contact center solution will provide real-time, per-call costs. Find which agents have great solutions that speed up processing. Discover which agents need training. Call cost monitoring does both.
• Business Intelligence Metrics: Aggregated data over weeks, months – even years – can show just when a business needs more agents on the phone. Weeknights? Weekends? Fewer agents in the morning and more at night? Answers come together with solid reporting from well-planned business intelligence metric monitoring.

Skills-Based Routing

Skills-based connects appropriately skilled agent for each caller’s need. It starts with an interactive voice response (IVR) system. By asking a few well-chosen questions, callers are then routed to agents most suited to solve their problem. This could mean grouping agents by a few special skills (address changes, billing issues, etc) or keeping agents in a general call queue, with a few troublesome call types being routed to ‘master’ agents for that call type.

Contact Center Planning

The combination of real-time agent performance monitoring, call forecasting and training needs assessment has an overall effect on most planning for a call center. Performance monitoring will shed light on the effectiveness of call volume scheduling, training scheduling and even plans for a change in the number of active seats is assessed. Example? As performance increases, fewer agents will be needed for the same volume of calls – affecting all of the above. Also, as changes in skill and efficiency are rolled out agent-by-agent, business intelligence on agent metrics and productivity will tell the tale of future seats, equipment and infrastructure.

A lot goes into creating productive, profitable workforces. Fortunately, today’s organizations get help with workforce management contact center software’s arrival. Organizations that use it see positive results, witnessing productive agents, happy customers and substantial profit margins.

To learn more about how workforce management contact center software decreases cost and increases margins, read “Implementing TCN to Increase Profit Margins.”