Planning the right amount of personnel, in the right place and time, with the necessary knowledge, a fundamental type of management in the Contact Center.
Until a few years ago, contact centers using WorkForce Management solutions in their operations tended to be those of large companies. With the acceleration in digital transformation, this trend has changed, and today medium-sized and even small businesses benefit from the use of Workforce Management systems.
What’s Workforce Management for?
Whether entirely manual or supported by the use of technology, a Workforce Management system is a set of activities related to the organization of personnel aimed at achieving the productivity of the workforce. These actions are usually segmented according to the industry and even, within the same sector, a WFM solution can serve different objectives.
Although the labor vision through the management of the workforce is strongly linked to contact centers, the issue is not exclusive to this area, but rather to human resources departments in practically any area of a company.
Advantages of automating WFM processes
Various variables affect an intensive human capital operation such as contact centers. The non-automated processes of WFM face their greatest difficulty – and little effectiveness – in the face of a couple of facts that are constant: the randomness in the incoming calls and the management of groups with multiple skills. From this perspective, a manual strategy without a defined methodology represents a great difficulty compared to the automation options through technological solutions.
Let’s focus on the task of sizing the workforce within the contact center and target the two possible failure scenarios: oversizing and undersizing. Let’s turn these manual model difficulties into numbers, as labor costs are a key trigger for using WFM solutions.
Oversizing the workforce, that is not using it reducing productivity, translates into unnecessary wages that your company is paying. In the case of BPOs, it can be the difference between whether your business is viable or not.
Approximately 80% of your costs are related to the salary of the agents.
This also means greater use of building infrastructure, such as positions, air conditioning, lighting, etc., in addition to the IT resource, which includes server capacity, ACD extensions, licenses, PC equipment, and more.
Undersizing the workforce does not allow matching the supply with the demand for agents. Thus, it is not possible to cover the required service metrics and consequently worsens the customer experience. Operators are overloaded generating absenteeism, turnover and desertion. Revenues are reduced by losing sales and customers.
A long waiting time consumes more resources in telephony, increasing costs. If you are a BPO, you could lose a contract due to long-term default.
When to automate a WFM system?
Identifying whether it is time to implement technology that improves operations and boosts contact center productivity will depend on what can be obtained from this resource. For this, it is enough to answer basic questions, such as:
- Does it help reduce costs?
- Can you increase income?
- Does it improve the customer experience?
- Does it allow agents to be more satisfied with shifts, breaks and workload?
It will be very important to get answers based on data. The shortest and best way to do so can be through an analysis of current management by experienced consultants in the field. In this way, it is possible to select the appropriate technology and enhance it by optimizing the methodology. The goal should be the correct integration and implementation of the appropriate WFM solution to increase your revenue, reduce operating costs and positively impact the customer experience.
Request a demonstration of our products or contact one of our specialists to help you find the best solution for your contact center.
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