Making workforce management a part of your inbound solution

Telemarketing & Call Center Solutions,  Jun 1998  by Sansom, Margaret

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Workforce management is becoming a staple in every inbound call center's diet. Whether centers are trying to find a way to "trim the fat" and solve their overstaffing problems or "put on a few pounds" by hiring more agents to deal with some thin telephone coverage periods, they need to find the right workforce management tools to keep their operations healthy.

A healthy call center will provide a better level of service to its callers, and service is becoming more and more important in today's consumer-oriented marketplace. Almost all of the call centers surveyed in the latest Call Center Benchmarking Report by TCS Management Group, Inc. (TCS) perform some type of inbound call handling, and 85 percent indicated that answering customer service calls is their primary function.

With such a high priority placed on customer service delivery, the means of providing that service become extremely important. Callers' satisfaction levels with the interaction that occurs between them and the call center agents is one measure by which a center can judge its success in this area. However, if before the callers even talk to the agents, they're already frustrated with the amount of time they've spent on hold, their attitude toward the business the center represents is not likely to be very positive. They may even run out of patience and choose to abandon the call completely. This is where workforce management comes into play as a proactive solution to a lot of potential problems.

Workforce management systems can give a call center the capability to forecast the number of calls it can expect to receive within a certain period, determine the number of agents needed to meet a particular service goal in handling those calls (such as 80 percent of all calls answered within 20 seconds or less) and Xs++le the staff appropriately. More and more call centers are turning to this type of automation to improve their customer service and, at the same time, optimize their personnel resources. In fact, 42 percent of the TCS benchmarking study participants indicated they are currently using workforce management software to aid in the tasks mentioned above.

Some call centers have even taken the next step and used advanced workforce management tools to further differentiate their customer service. These can provide the ability to do things like track agent adherence to an assigned schedule historically or in real-time. When agents sign in late for their shifts, take unscheduled breaks, lengthen their breaks or spend too much time in after-call wrap-up, calls become backlogged, and customer service suffers. A workforce management software adherence feature that alerts call center managers to agent deviations from work schedules so that they may take action to resolve them can go a very long way in boosting workforce productivity and service levels.

Although some of these tactics may seem to promote too much of a negative "big brother" mentality in the eyes of a call center workforce (I'm 45 seconds late for my shift; will this go on my record?), this need not be the case. First, software offering this sort of monitoring capability usually allows the user to predefine reasonable alarm conditions according to the center's requirements. The user may choose to be alerted only if someone is more than 10 minutes late, for instance. Second, presented in the right light, agents will see these types of workforce management applications as just as much a part of the "solution" as management does. The important point to get across is that they are to be used to both coach and reward, not necessarily to "punish." Shown and explained to agents in a constructive manner, the information from these types of advanced applications can be extremely helpful in getting them to realize how long breaks and late arrivals really do affect overall call center performance. Not only is a customer service mentality promoted within the center, but key agent performance information reported

by the system may also be used to recognize those agents who meet and exceed expectations.

Another thing to make special note of is that basic workforce management systems and advanced applications can be of great benefit to small, single-site call centers as well as to large, multisite, networked operations in a virtual environment. Size should not be the only factor that contributes to a center's decision to install this type of software. The complexity involved in scheduling and tracking staff is a much stronger indicator. Does the center operate around the clock? Are part-time staff and multiple call groups involved? Are many different types of calls answered? Many large and small operations can answer yes to these questions, and if they haven't already, need to take a serious look at workforce management automation.

The management of a networked operation, in particular, is a complicated process that pretty much necessitates the use of workforce management software. In such a virtual call center environment, the caller is presented to the next available agent across the network. From the caller's perspective, the customer service experience should be consistent. Management of such an environment requires that the software allow for forecasting, schedule creation and monitoring across all sites, by either the center designated responsible for the entire network or by the individual sites responsible for management of their own locations. Variations within the organization as to the authority and responsibility assigned to each location should be mirrored within the software. This means providing each site with the information necessary to manage its workforce on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This also means restricting access to system capabilities most suited to centralized control.