Workforce Management Featured Article
Effective Big Data Usage Can Improve the Workforce Management Function
“Water, water every where, nor any drop to drink” goes the eighteenth-century poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Coleridge. The subjects of the poem, of course, were sailors who were suffering from thirst while ironically staring at a great expanse of water.
Many companies today are in the same boat (pun intended) when it comes to data. They collect so much of it, sometimes deliberately and at other times by accident - that they simply don’t know what to do with it. They’re drowning in data, yet none of it is useful to them in any way.
The era of “big data” is upon us, and companies are addressing in different ways. Smart companies are using analytics to crunch all this information, both structured and unstructured, and use it for insight into how to run the business more efficiently and profitably. Lesser companies are sinking under the burden of the data, unable to formulate a way it can be put to good use.
Few business process collection as much information as the contact center does. Forward-thinking contact centers are using analytics solution to find trends on customer churn, best practices for cross-selling and upselling, the effects of unforeseen events on the business and ways to reduce staff levels while at the same time boosting customer satisfaction. One of the contact center functions that can greatly benefit from big data analysis is workforce management.
In a recent series of blog posts addressing a new report by Ardent Partners entitled, “The State of Contingent Workforce Management,” Ardent Partners' Research Director, Christopher J. Dwyer, reveals how “big data” has influenced workforce management today.
Building an effective schedule is a complex enough task for a medium-size contact center with regular business. Take a company with unpredictable of cyclical business and add into it factors such as traditional temporary labor, complex contingent labor and independent contractors, and it all becomes a mess. According to Dwyer, best-in-class enterprises cite their reliance on big data and analytics as key factors in their contingent workforce management success.
“Big data is certainly a formidable ally in the modern enterprise’s CWM [contingent workforce management] arsenal,” writes Dwyer. “Real-time visibility and intelligence can improve contingent workforce planning, budgeting, forecasting and overall management, and contribute to efficiencies.”
The old IT adage of “garbage in, garbage out” certainly applies here. If the data being provided to the forecasting and scheduling tool is irrelevant, unreliable or simply wrong, it not only won’t help, it will make the workforce management function less accurate. The right data, determined by analytics and added to historical data, can make an enormous difference in the reliability of the forecasting and the quality of the schedule.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi