Workforce management (WFM) is a critical part of running a contact center, with WFM teams taking on a series of tasks to optimize staffing levels. In doing so, they ensure cost efficiency, protect customers from wait times, and ensure that agent workloads are not overwhelming.
Consequently, WFM plays a significant role in ensuring the right business, customer, and agent outcomes. For this reason, workforce management is a dedicated module in most CCaaS solutions, and skilled WFM planners are in high demand.
A Definition of Workforce Management for the Contact Center
Workforce management (WFM) is the art of forecasting contact volumes, scheduling agents, and making real-time decisions to optimize service level and occupancy targets.
Planners will track the performance of historical metrics - such as forecast accuracy and schedule efficiency - to measure the effectiveness of their plans. In doing so, they may tweak forecasting algorithms, shift patterns, and real-time reporting to steadily optimize staffing calculations.
The Components of Workforce Management
To meet critical customer, agent, and business outcomes, WFM planners continually look to improve each of the following four elements of their strategy.
1. Demand Forecasting
By accurately predicting the number of contacts that the call center will receive, planners can ensure that they have the optimal number of staff in place at all times.
To do this, organizations must predict the volume of interactions they can expect across the day - which planners typically break down into 15 or 30-minute reporting periods.
Through analyzing trends in historical contact volumes and factoring in seasonality, contact centers may use many techniques to create forecasts. These can become quite complex. However, many WFM systems contain algorithms that automate these processes.
Testing the effectiveness of these algorithms on historical data, contact centers can uncover which is best suited to their environment. Experimenting to see which best forecasts during peak periods and "what if" scenarios is also an excellent practice.
2. Workforce Scheduling and Shift Design
Now understanding the forecasted demand across different intervals, planners map out staff schedules to meet the demand.
Traditionally, planners use an Erlang C calculator to calculate how many agents are necessary. Simply entering the forecasted demand, length of the reporting period, and average handling time into the calculator will enable a contact center to determine its ideal staffing requirement to meet its desired service level and occupancy rate.
However, thanks to the rise of better scheduling algorithms within WFM systems, there are now better ways to make staffing calculations.