Laying the right Workforce Management Foundations

Part 1 of Workforce Management Foundations, by Jeff Austin

Within a call centre, the fundamental role of the workforce management team is to ensure that the business is operating at maximum logistical efficiency. This is achieved by ensuring the most effective balance between staffing and service level requirements is maintained.

While this is a vital role in itself, workforce management (WFM) can add much more strategic value and be a business enabler, transforming a call centre from a reactive to a proactive business. In this article, the first in a three part series looking at how to leverage your WFM capabilities, Jeff Austin, Managing Director of Siyandza Skills Development Training, explains how to make sure the right foundations are in place.

Why workforce management?

The basic goal of WFM is to get the right number of people in the right place at the right time. In other words, to ensure that there are the right number of skilled staff available to meet customer demand through the channel of their choice (call, email, SMS, etc.) within the contracted service levels.

The forecasted volumes of interactions flowing through these channels is the basis for planning many critical outputs within the call centre ─ since the numbers of staff required to work at any given time dictate the organisation’s recruitment and training needs, support staff requirements, quality assessment schedule and, most importantly, how many customers the business will be able to service during any specified time period.

As a result, the fundamental role of WFM within a call centre is to: forecast volumes of customer contacts that will come into or out of the call centre; use these forecasts to determine workload levels; combine these inputs to create staffing schedules that meet agreed service level requirements; assign the schedules, and manage changes on an ongoing, real-time basis.

Planning for future events

Forecasting allows a business to plan for future events. It not only allows potential volumes of existing business to be determined, it can also help plan for future events like the introduction of new lines of business or technologies, the changing of a process or procedure, or the opening of a new call centre.

In the context of a call centre the foundation of any good staffing plan is the creation of an accurate forecast that plans, with relatively high accuracy, how many transactions the call centre will receive in the future. To achieve this, there are two critical measurements that must be forecasted: AHT (Average Handle Time) and number of Interactions (calls, emails, SMS, web chat sessions, etc.).

AHT is a critical measurement because it determines how long, on average, it takes for an agent to complete a transaction with a customer. It can be used to track the duration of a transaction, such as a call, or how long it takes to assemble something in a factory. The key to AHT is to track how long it takes to complete a task from start to finish.

Garbage in, garbage out

When working with a forecast, it is important to remember the old adage: "Garbage in, Garbage out" - meaning that if you base your forecast on poor or erroneous historical data or assumptions, the resulting forecast will not be accurate and any actions taken based on it (i.e. staffing plans, purchase of technology, goal setting) may prove flawed.

The forecasting process, essentially, follows these steps:

Collect historical data to be used for the forecast. Analyse and adjust the data as needed (i.e. "scrub" the data). Break the historical data down to identify trends (i.e. recurring and irregular variations). Apply identified trends and variations to forecast volumes - critical to this process is input from the business (i.e. marketing team) regarding known and planned future events that will impact volumes. If such events are anticipated, the forecasting team will have to either look at similar historical events to apply the impact to planned events or go through a scenario planning process to determine the impacts. Finally, obtain approval and agreement on the forecast from the call centre’s Line Management.

Determining workloads

Once the forecast has been created, we know how many interactions the call centre will handle in the future. The next step is to determine how many people will be required to handle all of these interactions. This is known as the related ‘workload’ and there are two critical factors to include in this planning stage:

The "People Factor" ─ the investment a business makes in its staff or other events that takes them away from their work. In other words, training, coaching, absenteeism, meetings, etc. The "Service Level Factor" ─ the fact that nobody can work 100% of the time (in call centre lingo, "achieve 100% occupancy"). This factor is often overlooked and frequently responsible for inaccuracies that creep into the planning stage. It remains a fact that no one can continuously perform their work, every second they are scheduled to do so, without generating other negative impacts on the business especially increased absenteeism and attrition.

Once these two factors are applied to the forecasted volumes, the actual number of staff needed to achieve the specified service level targets can be determined. This is critical to the process because although more people are required to handle interactions, when the People Factor and Service Level Factor are accounted for, not doing so will result in a service level shortfall.

With the forecasted volumes and associated workloads determined, the call centre knows how many people will be required at every interval throughout the day (the intervals are, typically, every 30 minutes) and schedules can be created against the requirements.

Staffing schedules

Ultimately, this process ensures that the WFM team will produce schedules that accurately balance historical trends against future volumes, while also accounting for planned events (i.e. training, coaching and absenteeism) ─ ensuring that the right numbers of people are in the right place at the right time to achieve service level targets.

It is important to note that this is not a ‘locked’ process, rather one that needs to be continuously reviewed and adjusted. Maintaining the optimum balance between staffing and service levels is a constant dynamic and, the moment the actual volumes of interactions become higher or lower than expected, the WFM team should be able to guide the business in how best to adjust staffing levels to achieve targets.

To that end, the WFM team should run a continuous process that regularly updates and adjusts forecasts, this process should include:

forecasting; capacity planning; scheduling; real-time resource monitoring; real-time reporting, and maintenance and updating.

Collectively, forecasting and scheduling forms the foundation of WFM within a CC. Both are vital functions in themselves, but they also form a platform from which WFM can start to add significant strategic value and develop into a business enabler, transforming a call centre from a reactive to a proactive business.

In part 2 - Exploiting the strategic value of Workforce management - of this series, Jeff Austin looks at Capacity Planning and how using this next stage properly can convert WFM into a business enabler.