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Workforce management systems can make a substantial impact on operating costs and service delivery in contact centers. Companies in the market for a workforce management tool today face a mind-boggling array of choices.
Automated workforce management systems range from quite simplistic to highly complex, with a wide range of price tags to match. The decision on which system to invest in should be driven by the overall potential for return to an operation rather than simply the cost and ease-of-use of the solution.
Experience has shown that gaining the maximum return on investment requires a commitment to a sophisticated tool and a workforce management team with the expertise to make the most of it. Since the cost of staffing in most call centers is between 60 and 70 percent of the total budget, the incremental benefits of selecting the best solution for your operation and implementing it successfully are significant.
Workforce Management Marketplace
Since workforce management software tools arrived on the market in the 1980s, the capabilities and options have grown rapidly. Today the marketplace is essentially divided into three distinct categories:
- Low-end tools assist in one facet of workforce management, usually calculating the staff needed in a half-hour period to handle a defined workload to meet a specific service goal. Being somewhat single-purposed, tools in this category provide few configuration options to adapt to operational differences and rarely provide for automatic collection of data from other systems.
- Mid-range workforce management tools perform the functions of forecasting, scheduling, and daily performance management with a focus on ease-of-use. In an effort to make them simple to implement and use, these tools offer limited flexibility to accommodate highly complex situations. Some will interface to other systems to import and export data; others do not.
- High-end workforce management tools have many options and capabilities to adjust to nearly any kind of contact center environment. These tools may sacrifice ease-of-use in order to provide the sophistication and flexibility needed to match the unique needs of complex staffing situations.
Deciding Which Tool is Best
Almost all contact centers can benefit from a workforce management tool. The question is which tool, the high-end tool versus the less expensive simpler models, offers the highest potential for return? First, it’s probably safe to say that if a contact center has 35 people who all handle incoming calls from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, they probably do not need a highly sophisticated tool to tell people when to come to work and go home.
Even a simple workforce management tool offers the ability to help this type of operation develop a more accurate forecast of when the workload will arrive, when breaks, lunches, and training should be scheduled, and adjust to the daily variations that are the standard fare of contact centers.
The Impact of Operational Complexity
Even if small and simple now, most contact centers expand, consolidate, and/or add more requirements over time. Add just a little operational complexity and the operational challenges grow exponentially. What if the center in the previous example expands their hours of operation just slightly, possibly 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday?
With additional hours it is likely that a wider variety of shifts are needed to cover them. The use of part-time personnel also becomes increasingly attractive to cover the peaks and weekends without overstaffing during the lower volume periods. Figuring out what the best combination of shifts might be is a complex, iterative process, and accommodating the balance of business needs and agent preferences is even more challenging.
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