A call center workforce management software refers to the software solutions dedicatedly tailored for contact center operations, backend processes that connect customers with the right agents, in the right place and at the right time, thereby resulting in excellent customer interaction. A call center workforce management is a process used by contact centers to handle customer interactions at fewer costs and in a minimum timeframe. By leveraging a metric named “service level,” call centers can streamline their workforce management through objectives that define how quickly they respond to customer issues and resolve them. A call center is authorized to set its service level based on the desired cost efficiency and customer experience expectations.
• Efficient staffing
Staffing plays a crucial role in ensuring your workforce possesses the right skills, offering training if needed, and creating the ideal work rules. As staffing costs contribute to most overall call center expenditures, focusing on skill training empowers agents to become more proficient in dealing with customer issues. Also, adding flexibility in work rules helps to minimize unwanted staff attrition.
• Forecasting workload
Forecasting helps predict the peaks of calls that a call center receives throughout a day, week, month, or even season. It is the foundation of the call center workforce management software. Forecasting is based on inputs like historical call volumes, call arrival patterns, average handling time, efficiency, etc. Forecasting workload helps contact center managers with their long-term strategic planning in terms of budgeting and recruiting.
• Optimizing work schedules
The workforce management software should create an effective work schedule on the basis of its contact center input. By effectively creating automated and optimized schedules, it becomes easy to evenly schedule staff across the interval. As the resource graph matches well with the volume curve, agents experience a better and less stressful work situation.
• Intra-day management for smooth operations
With effective intraday management, call center managers can gain clear insights into the situation at hand. By ensuring that staff strictly follows the plan: i.e., doing the right things in the right way and at the right time, operations managers can achieve the targets defined for adherence and average handling time (AHT).
• Live Performance Analysis
By gaining insights into key performance indicators such as average handling time (AHT), absenteeism, average after-call work, readiness, and real-time adherence, efficient workforce management software helps to measure the performance of agents and team leaders of the contact center.
As call centers have been continuously growing in terms of size and complexity, agents are supposed to handle multiple transactions across various channels. Using manual schedule management through spreadsheets isn’t sufficient enough to meet the rising needs. That’s where the need for effective call center workforce management software arises! By driving the productivity of your call center, workforce management software comes with indirect benefits such as:
To manually re-input or manipulate spreadsheet data takes a lot of time and leads to errors. It’s not possible to confirm the accuracy of schedules created via spreadsheet. A call center workforce management software allows forecasts and schedules to run efficiently and quickly — so contact centers can immediately respond to seasonality or staffing fluctuations. By leveraging visual reporting to assess forecast accuracy, contact center managers can quickly rectify cases where the center is either overstaffed or understaffed.
Not paying attention to the fundamental principles
Investing in workforce management software doesn’t involve understanding the features and functions of the system only. It’s important to identify the importance of fundamental WFM principles in maximizing your system’s ROI potential. While your team can get trained by a WFM vendor about the system’s functionalities, your users should be aware of what they’re doing and the reasons behind it.
Reluctance to revamp existing practices
While adopting a WFM software, brands usually mirror their existing
scheduling rules and practices. This helps to build a performance baseline for the WFM changes in the future. The problem arises when those changes never happen, and everything continues on the earlier track. This unwillingness to change existing WFM practices can negatively impact your system’s ROI.
Lack of process documentation
Equipping agents with process documentation is the first thing that contact center managers would do before setting a training class for them. However, these managers fail to document the workforce management-related processes that comprise automated systems. This is one of the surest ways of diminishing your system’s ROI.
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