To many, WFM is a necessary evil: you need to have some tool to tell agents when to work. But without proper WFM optimisation, the price to pay is hefty: expensive tooling and a team with stubborn specialists.
Why WFM Is More Than a Scheduling Tool
Seeing WFM this way is a missed opportunity. WFM is also instrumental in improving contact center performance for agents, customers, and the CFO. When done well, this improvement might quickly compensate for the costs of WFM. However, this optimisation step is often skipped, one is more focused on functionality than on optimality. When designing the WFM processes, many choices are implicitly made without even thinking about their consequences.
Where the Biggest Gains Are
Each step of the WFM cycle offers room for WFM optimisation. For example, better forecasting leads to a lower loss of unproductive hours, reducing your required workforce. Or, having a scheduling engine that schedules weeks at a time can produce better schedules which are less costly.
But the process where most often big improvements can be made is the assignment of tasks to agents. This is mostly done by routing and, when that fails, by intraday managers. Often, we see that routing can be improved. A recent customer case, for example, showed a very high service level for one queue and lower ones for others. This high service level can only be achieved by agents who were idle at the moment of call arrival. This is in contradiction with the bad SL on the other queues; by prioritising these queues in the routing, the SL becomes more balanced and overall occupancy goes up. Also, agents perceive more fairness. At the same time, better routing avoids the need for intraday managers to intervene, avoiding late suboptimal decisions.
Similar arguments hold for mixing different channels: smart blending improves performance, makes the contact center more robust to unforeseen changes and avoids suboptimal decisions. The improvements at the routing level should be reflected at the scheduling and capacity planning steps, leading to fewer agents and lower costs.
The Right Question to Ask
In conclusion: WFM is not a cost item, but an opportunity for improvement, both in terms of costs and employee and customer experience. It’s not about functionality, but about optimality. The wrong question is: how much does our WFM tool cost? Instead, it should be: how much can we save by better WFM tooling and routing? Answering this question should be the leading factor in the choice of tooling.