Mastering Workforce Management in Your Call Center

There are two sides to the coin when it comes to workforce management (WFM) in your contact center:

• Making sure you have enough staff to service customers without overstaffing
• Making sure you keep your agents happy and productive

With an ever-increasing customer demand and an increasing number of agents reporting that they suffer from work-related burnout and absenteeism, finding a balance between these key facets is a delicate balancing act.

When you get the right people in the right place at the right time, everyone’s happy, and your business will be productive. We call this workforce engagement.

These days, we’re talking about more than Erlang calculators and Excel spreadsheets for call center staffing. It’s no longer a numbers game. WFM is a vital call center strategy you must get right.

Why Contact Center WFM Is so Important

When you treat WFM with the respect and importance it warrants, you get many things right in your business, not just call center operations.

From a customer point of view, you achieve optimal service quality. When customers phone in, they get through to an agent — and the right agent, too — without waiting a long time.

And you’re doing this within budget. For operational efficiency, it’s one thing to hire lots of call center agents to handle call volumes. Executing this without turning your call center into a cost center is another thing entirely.

By maximizing agents’ time and skills while minimizing operational costs, you put a green check mark next to your business unit for budget, bottom line, and customer satisfaction.

From an employee point of view, it’s no secret that happy agents lead to better customer service and agent retention. If you can remove the potential for agent burnout and understaffing while increasing productivity and job satisfaction, you create a balanced environment and a high-performing team.

Key Components of WFM for Call Centers

Getting WFM right isn’t a one-and-done exercise; there is no longer a single tool or process.

Look out for three crucial elements when planning your WFM the first or next time:

Demand forecasting

When planning contact operations, if you know your expected contact volumes, you can forecast the level of service you need to provide. 

For example, if you know you have a peak in billing queries every Wednesday because your invoices get sent out on Tuesday evenings, you can plan your cover and overtime schedule or bring in a new part-time agent who specializes in this area.

You can also use historical data and analyze seasonality and trends to predict the baseline number of agents you need to manage incoming calls. 

You might have 300 calls per day and a handle time of less than 30 seconds. This suggests a good level of service and enough agents on call. 

If, however, you receive 300 inbound calls per day but have a low first-call resolution rate, there’s a clear need for more staff or better resource allocation.

Related: The Complete Guide to Call Center Forecasting

Scheduling

While the Erlang calculator was great for entering your number of calls and generating the number of contact center agents you needed, it didn’t factor in agent skill sets and preferences.

We now know the keys to optimizing staff schedules are considering breaks, genuine agent availability, and call monitoring as well as calculating an agent-to-call ratio.

Automated scheduling tools factor in both the number of hours available in a day/week and the types of inquiries agents are handling.

Some calls may need a longer wrap-up or careful escalation, and agents may need to mentally switch off after a heated call. 

Rather than relying on punching numbers, embrace automation for optimized schedule building that includes all the factors involved in managing inbound calls.

Related: Nextiva Workforce Scheduling: Where Automation Meets Optimization

Real-time monitoring

Real-time monitoring leverages data being processed in the moment to enable you to make better decisions relating to staffing levels. This is called intraday management.

Even with all the planning in the world, sometimes unpredictable things happen. If there’s a power outage or a natural disaster, expect call volume fluctuations throughout the day.

When this happens, you have two choices:

• Wait until it’s too late to react.
• Use real-time monitoring to make a change as soon as an anomaly gets spotted.

The ability to adapt schedules and resources for optimal efficiency means you don’t just start out with a good staffing level; you maintain it even in uncertain conditions. 

By freeing up staff from other departments, enabling remote agents, or diverting to an outsourced call center, you can ensure consistent service levels and keep your customers happy.

Related: How to Improve Your Contact Center Workforce Management

WFM Strategies for a Better Workplace

Switching on WFM functionality is a solid start. But you need to go further to provide a best-in-class customer experience and look after your staff.

Here are four simple strategies to adopt if you’re serious about call center workforce management:

Empower your call center agents

When agents are in the know, you’re arming them with everything they need to perform better.

If it’s obvious which tasks and behaviors correlate with performance, agents will double down in these areas.

There are three headline components to introduce when it comes to agent empowerment:

• Clear performance management: Set targets and use data to benchmark good and great customer service.
• Gamification: Encourage ownership and self-improvement by creating a sense of friendly competition and incentives to strive for continuous improvement.
• Agent training and development: Provide upfront and ongoing support for both day-to-day task execution and career development.

“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”

~Henry Ford

Make decisions based on data

When it comes to measuring employee engagement, you need data. Modern workforce management tools are bursting with numbers, charts, and outcomes.

When the time comes to make a change, lean on these three major data points:

• Key performance indicators: Track agent performance levels to make sure there’s no potential for burnout or elevated stress.
• Call center metrics: Use measures like service level, schedule adherence, agent utilization, and customer satisfaction to ensure company performance does not dip.
• Resource allocation: Make data-backed decisions for agent scheduling and always ensure you have the right people in the right places.

Take employee well-being seriously

A key theme of the modern approach to workforce engagement is ensuring you don’t get to the point of burnout.

But knowing it’s about to happen and preventing it are two different things. 

If you let an agent get to the edge of the cliff, you’ve failed. You either have a burned-out employee who can’t focus or one who will leave for a less stressful job.

Instead, you must facilitate an enjoyable and productive workplace:

• Schedule regular check-ins: Have a monthly open conversation — verbal or via chat — that doesn’t focus on work performance.
• Have flexible scheduling options: Switch up rotas, types of customer interactions, and even locations.
• Incorporate work-life balance initiatives: Reduce commute times with remote working or allow a change in shift pattern for special occasions.

Let the software do the hard work

Let’s be honest. These might be drastic changes for some call centers.

Changing your scheduling processes can often be time-consuming and a bit of a shock to the system — unless you have the right WFM software doing the hard work for you.

For accurate forecasting, automated scheduling, and real-time monitoring, find a WFM solution you can get started with straight out of the box.

That means a solution that integrates with your existing call center software as a minimum. All the data you’ve collected over the years will feed into a WFM tool, enabling a swift plan to forecast, schedule, and allocate resources.

Related: How to Build a High-Performing B2B Call Center

Pair Your WFM With Nextiva

Like the sound of WFM software but don’t know where to get started?

That’s where Nextiva’s contact center solution comes in.

You can access the headline components like demand forecasting, automated rota scheduling, and real-time monitoring. That means you set the tone for high-performance customer support and employee satisfaction. 

You’ll be introducing the benefits of WFM and empowering staff and supervisors to take a new approach. Making data-backed decisions, putting employees first, and empowering agents are often direct results of introducing the right WFM tool.

You can even introduce self-service options for agents to manage schedules and swap shifts.

Irina Mateeva, a WFM transformation consultant, says this should be standard functionality in a WFM solution. Yet, it’s not widely marketed.

“Shift swaps — this should be standard functionality. If this is a vendor’s selling point, then the vendor doesn’t have much else to offer.” 

If Patsy has a last-minute dentist appointment for the pain she’s been battling all week, Muhammed can swap shifts with the click of a button. You reduce the workload of call center managers while providing the environment agents crave.

With Nextiva, you get access to:

• A single platform for omnichannel contact management and resource planning
• Gamification and team benchmarking backed by real-time and historical data
• Extensive analytics for performance stats, queue traffic, and campaign success
• Supervisor tools like artificial intelligence (AI) transcription and intuitive coaching
• Advanced features like virtual agents, AI-driven productivity tools, and rich automation

If you’re a high-growth or high-volume call center with skilled customer service agents, look no further than workforce management from Nextiva.

Related: How to Spot Call Center Absenteeism and Fix It