Optimize your contact center with workforce management (WFM) software
Create stronger internal processes, focused teams, and sustainable performance levels with Workforce Management Software like RingCX.
Beyond having first-rate products or providing exceptional customer support, successful businesses put great focus on managing internal processes that involve their most important asset—their employees.
The path to success certainly calls for a dedicated team that’s focused on common goals. As to how you can create such a team and develop sustainable workforce performance levels, that’s where workforce management comes in. Let this be your quick workforce management reference guide.
What is workforce management (WFM)?
Workforce management refers to a set of internal processes necessary to create and keep the most efficient workforce possible. It covers all functions and activities needed to maintain a productive workforce, including but not limited to:
- Human resource management (HRM)
- Talent management
- Field service management
- Labor management
- Leave management
- Workforce planning
- Workforce analytics
What does a workforce manager do?
A workforce manager oversees a company's productivity at the individual, departmental, and organizational levels. As such, they see to it that an efficient workforce management system is in place.
How does workforce management work?
What is workforce management in a contact center?
Contact center workforce management aims to assign the right number of agents with the right skill sets at the right time. You want to go for the best possible fit between the amount of work required and the number of workers scheduled. This approach ensures that your business can consistently deliver excellent customer service.
Workforce management process
Forecasting involves predicting your future workload, so you can determine your labor requirements. To make an accurate forecast, you have to consider demand signals like historical data, weather, special events, and equipment failure. With a promo in effect, for example, a company might experience a surge in inbound call volumes.
With an accurate forecast of future call demands, you can define the shifts and hours that would be known as the agents’ official work schedule. Your employee scheduling software should be able to consider each agent’s skills, contracted work rules, and calendar items to help you optimize schedules given the customer interaction patterns.
Assign the right number of agents to appropriate shifts to meet operational needs. With our previous example, the company may respond to an increase in inbound call volume by scheduling more agents with specific product knowledge to handle inbound interactions. That will ensure appropriate staffing levels to manage the elevated workload throughout the promo period.
A contact center is a fast-paced environment, and anything can happen at any given time. Your goal is to anticipate changes (e.g., due to absenteeism, sudden spikes in call volume, etc.) and to be able to re-forecast targets to ensure service levels are still being met and agents are doing their assigned tasks during each interval.
Training your workers is key to the success of your contact center. It may get complicated, however, if you have to take them away from their tasks, specifically when there’s a spike in inbound calls. You need your agents at their desk helping your customers.
So when is the right time to train your agents without negatively impacting your contact center performance? Workforce management will help you find the optimum time for training and other meetings with your agents.
Why is workforce management important?
Workforce management is important because it makes way for effective forecasting, scheduling, and staffing, as well as making adjustments in real time. Just as critical is having access to the right WFM software and WFM tools to automate your processes.
Top reasons for adding a workforce management process
Good time-tracking software allows you to accurately track time and attendance data, an obvious benefit of WFM software. But as you will learn, the benefits of WFM systems don’t end there.
We’ve mentioned this earlier, but let’s be a bit more specific this time—a happy workforce is a must-have. A happy workforce is a productive workforce, making it the most significant competitive advantage a business could have. As a workforce manager, you’d want to have engaged employees who put in nothing less than their best effort to accomplish their assigned tasks. Automated WFM systems give your employee engagement efforts a big push by helping you schedule agents properly.
Make your staff even happier by giving them more flexibility with their shifts while maintaining the efficiency of your contact center. This is something they’ll surely appreciate.
Understaffing stops you from responding to customer interactions efficiently, while overstaffing makes for idle time and underutilized agents. None of these will happen with proper scheduling. You’ll instead be able to maximize the individual contributions of your employees, balancing productivity and payroll costs.
Fact: Employees don’t come cheap. It doesn’t take a human capital management expert to know that the total sum of employees’ salaries, including overtime and indirect compensation, makes up a considerable chunk of a company’s operational costs. That makes WFM crucial to reducing expenses.
Here are a few other areas where you can minimize costs with WFM:
- Administrative costs - Submit payroll in minutes without having to fix timesheet inaccuracies or work on error-prone clerical tasks
- Unplanned overtime - Eliminate unnecessary overtime hours by planning for the correct number of agents
- Time theft - Reduce fraudulent hours with an online time clock (RingCentral integrates well with different WFM solutions, time clocks included)
- Labor law violations - Quality workforce management systems provide oversight and complete employee records to guarantee compliance
- Wage and hour miscalculations - Workforce management solution removes errors in time and pay calculations and ensures pay rules are correctly implemented
With access to more insights, context, and workforce management tools, the workforce manager will be able to make informed decisions and be less likely to make incorrect judgments (think about functional requirements like staffing).
They’ll respond to fluctuating project demand levels without sacrificing quality, reallocate human resources when necessary, and enforce ways to improve customer satisfaction or promote corporate social responsibility.
Incomplete spreadsheets, agent turnover, filing discrepancies—there was a time when issues like these made it hard for businesses to optimize their workforce management processes. That’s mainly because they were doing manual paperwork or using disconnected systems to record and analyze operational data.
With industry-leading workforce management solutions like the one offered by RingCentral, you can easily track and analyze data. Your managers will be able to compare your actual contact center performance against your budget and make process adjustments if needed.
These days, it isn’t uncommon for businesses to have remote employees—something old WFM systems may not be able to handle effectively. Go for a workforce management solution that has the flexibility to accommodate a global workforce.
What is the best workforce management software for contact centers?
Here’s something you probably didn’t expect: Just as the best HR software or workforce manager may not exist, you’d probably have a tough time looking for the best workforce management software.
You may be able to find one with the most comprehensive set of tools and features, but if you’re not going to use all of them, you’re wasting funds. It’s about having the right workforce management software. That one solution that best addresses your specific needs and addresses common contact center challenges, such as:
- Absenteeism - Unsatisfied workers tend to feel overly stressed or burned out and start to look for excuses not to come in
- High turnover rate - Poor employee experiences may ultimately force people to leave an organization
- Time and attendance tracking - Paper-based tracking is open to discrepancies and employee dishonesty as opposed to advanced reporting and analytics
- Lack of budget - High costs of staffing, failure to recognize savings in technological investments, and falsely allocating resources—just to name a few causes
- Lack of open communication with management - Agents may feel that managers are in a bubble of their own
Tackling these challenges won’t be easy, but as you may have noticed, all of them can be addressed by a solid WFM strategy. With streamlined processes, clear objectives, and the appropriate technology, you can effectively manage your workforce to ensure optimal performance and generate happy customer stories.
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Find out how to improve workforce management and create effortless experiences for employees and customers.
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