Workforce management requires a large amount of process definition and organisational consideration. One common mistake that contact centre leaders often make is an investment in workforce management software without fully evaluating how they will use it along with the processes and best practices that support it.
These considerations are critical to the success of any workforce management program and without evaluating these items, it is highly probable that companies will invest in workforce management technology and receive no return on investment.
The Day Classifications is used to identify and track the various days of the week. Day Classifications can be used to identify anomalies in the company history that it would like to remove during the forecasting process, so those days don't skew future forecasts. The second use for Day Classifications is when a company wants to identify specific days/patterns for use in a future forecast.
These uses can be especially helpful in minimising the amount of time necessary to analyse and adjust the forecast if maintained correctly.
Know the rules
Weekly Shift Definitions are used to define the weekly “work rules” around how agent schedules will be built, including things like the minimum and maximum hours per week/day, breaks, meals and the days of the week to which these rules apply.
While Shift Definitions can be assigned to individual agents, companies should not establish a Shift Definition for every agent in the system. The impact on schedule efficiency is one of the largest reasons to avoid this practice. This can be an administrative nightmare and end up costing additional money for the FTEs that support the product.
The Agent Constraints feature allows users to apply an additional set of scheduling rules on top of those already included in the Weekly Shift Definition at the individual agent level.
One of the hardest and most important parts of rolling out schedule adherence as a metric and a culture in a company's contact centre is selecting the right schedule adherence goal.
Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.
When used correctly, Agent Constraints can be helpful in automating some of the otherwise manual individual schedule changes that may be outside of the normal Shift Definition.
The Number of Weeks of ACD History setting allows users to establish a default for the number of weeks of history that are automatically included in the forecasting process.
Saving time
This feature automates the data selection piece of the forecasting process, and when coupled with analytics around the number of weeks and the Day Classification feature, users can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes them to review, edit and publish new forecasts and schedules.
The Shrinkage Factor is a vital setting, which allows users to include an amount of unplanned shrinkage in the upcoming forecast and schedule generation. While most people think of absences as the best example of unplanned shrinkage, this factor should also include any unplanned events or activities in addition to absences.
One common misconception in many contact centres with high amounts of unplanned shrinkage is that pre-planning isn't possible because their environment is “different”. While this may be true in small portions of the industry, in most cases, companies can improve the amount of pre-planned shrinkage through the use of proper procedures for pre-planning shrinkage and good leadership.
One of the first steps in the forecasting and scheduling process is the completion of a data review to determine how accurate or valuable a company's most recent data will be in predicting the future. This typically involves some sort of “normalisation” process of the data a company plans to use.
Schedule generation and assignment is the next step in the workforce management process. Interaction Optimiser supports two main methodologies today, including skill-based scheduling and Agent Preferences.
Once all of the forecasting, scheduling and planning is complete, intraday management is the last critical step of the workforce management process. Interaction Optimiser has several features that are designed to assist users with this critical piece of the process, including Intraday Monitoring with Reforecast, same-day schedule administration with analytics and Real-Time Adherence.
One of the hardest and most important parts of rolling out schedule adherence as a metric and a culture in a company's contact centre is selecting the right schedule adherence goal. When selecting a goal, a company needs to choose one that both employees and leadership teams will understand and support.
Setting the goal too low can erode all of the efficiency gains a company has worked so hard to achieve during the workforce management process.
To some, 95% may sound like a challenging goal, but if agents are consistently performing at 95% adherence, that means they are actually out of adherence a little over two hours each week, and a whopping total of 8.5 hours each month.
Essentially, if a company sets a schedule adherence goal of 95%, it is giving its agents a whole day every month to be out of adherence for free. Average handling time (AHT) can also be a consideration when trying to determine how many minutes the agents are actually stuck on calls when their break/lunch occurs.
Contact types that have extremely long AHTs have a greater chance of impacting an agents' entire break/lunch.
The Real-Time Adherence feature within Interaction Optimiser provides great visibility into an agent's schedule adherence, and, in much of the contact centre industry, Real-Time Adherence is a “must-have” standard feature rather than an “optional” feature.
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