Workforce Management Featured Article
Modern Workforce Management Helps Predict the Future - Sort Of
Forecasting is a critical operation for any business. Companies forecast sales so they can predict how much revenue they will make. They forecast their tax bills so they can avoid paying too much or too little. They forecast their technology needs, their budgets and their employees’ behavior. In the contact center, companies must forecast the number of calls and contacts they will receive at any given time. Like all forecasts, it’s critical to come as close as possible to reality in order to avoid going over or under on resource allocation. Getting it wrong has serious consequences: a contact center that is over-staffed is costing the company unnecessary money (and wasting agent skills), and a contact center understaffed risks customers encountering long wait times and call queues, which damages customer relationships.
Forecasting is a science, and it will never be right all the time. (Witness the weather forecast.) The trick is to use a mix of past behavior – one of the best indicators for future happenings – and a mix of other variables that are likely to affect future behavior. In the contact center, it’s often the job of the workforce management solution to forecast call volume. Many companies still do workforce management manually, on spreadsheets and using mathematical formulas, and the forecasting capabilities of these methods are limited, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo. A modern workforce management solution can bring to bear elements humans simply can’t account for.
“With the right workforce management system, one capable of predicting future call volume and agent staffing needs, you have everything you need to make the tasks of forecasting and scheduling more accurate and more efficient,” he wrote. “When forecasting is done right, the result is the right number of agents at their desks, handling call volume without long wait times.”
Ciarlo recommends several tips for using your workforce management solution to get the forecast right, including using work history data to anticipate future volume, agent requirements, average call handling time and other performance indicators as well as gathering data through analysis of call types and routing policies. Testing is a way companies can run through alternative scenarios based on changes in staffing (imagine an agent goes home sick) or call volume so managers can anticipate changes before they happen. Throughout the day, it’s important for managers to review updates to understand when adjustments might be required to the schedule.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi