For decades, Workforce Management (WFM) has been the backbone of contact center operations.
Forecasting demand, scheduling staff, and keeping costs in check remain the fundamentals. Yet while the discipline itself has not radically changed, almost everything around it has.
Customer expectations are rising, automation is stripping away simpler interactions, and a new generation of agents is rewriting the rules of work.
The result is a dramatically different landscape for planners, one where empathy and technical insight must now work hand-in-hand.
“Agents today want to feel much more empowered, with significantly more collaborative working conditions rather than the rigid, top-down management styles of the past,” explains Jim Fleming, WFM Solutions Consultant at Sabio Group.
“That shift alone creates challenges for planners who are also juggling increased absence rates, delayed sickness payments, and the impact of a buoyant remote working market.”
Agents With Choices
The influence of the gig economy looms large in the contact center.
Younger workers in particular are less likely to stay loyal to one employer, especially with greater opportunities for flexible remote work now available.
At the same time, the calls that reach agents are more complex than ever, as Fleming notes:
“The simpler interactions are now handled by AI and automation, leaving agents with a constant flow of more intensive, complex cases.
“This creates higher stress levels and contributes to elevated attrition rates, as agents find the work more demanding while having more employment options available to them.”
The consequence is a volatile workforce, where recruitment and training can quickly become a never-ending cycle unless organizations take a more empathetic approach to scheduling and support.
Beyond Spreadsheets
While agents are asking for more flexibility, planners themselves are under mounting pressure due to enhanced workloads.
“Today’s planners require much deeper technical skills – way beyond Excel formulas – extending to VBA, SQL, and increasingly Python for data analysis,” says Fleming.
“The role is pivoting from largely administrative to providing insights and strategic direction not just to contact center management, but across the business in areas like HR, Marketing, and Finance.”
Unfortunately, planners are not being rewarded for taking on these more skillful and demanding tasks.
According to Sabio’s latest eBook, planning teams are “often victims of their own success,” because they manage to juggle so many conflicting priorities.
This results in the teams rarely being given additional resources to absorb new channels or shifting business demands.
Moreover, it’s not uncommon for finance to demand a 10% cost reduction year on year, leaving planners to find creative ways to do more with less.
As a result, the role has evolved far beyond the days of Excel-based scheduling.
Empathy as a Planning Tool
Perhaps the most striking evolution is the central role of empathy in WFM.
Where planners once focused solely on service levels and cost, today, they must also consider the well-being of the people behind the schedules.
Fleming details how the planning function has evolved from asking ‘What number can I get past finance?’ to genuinely considering ‘How can we reduce pressure on agents while still meeting business objectives?’.
