subject: Workforce Management in Call center [print this page] Workforce Management in Call center Workforce Management in Call center
Workforce Management in Call Center
Workforce Management has received the attention of managements in recent years due to the fluctuations of demand and supply mismatches, which were hitherto unknown in traditional industries. Not that the idea is totally new but the new online business not restricted by any geographical limitations have brought new challenges by introducing the uncertainty in the volumes of work to be handles. A wrong guess on either side is bound to have direct impact in both short term and long term, in terms of the bottom line or customer dissatisfaction.
For instance, in case of a call centre, on one hand the clients have an expectation to be served when they want. But to ensure this absolute requirement is to provide the adequate workforce and if there is a drop in the actual calls being received, then the management has to bear the expenses of the redundant workforce.
It is obvious that the optimized Workforce Management necessarily involves forecasting and scheduling. Fortunately there are programs available for both handling these critical factors. Investment in efficient Workforce Management software (WFM) is certainly a solution for easily optimizing the management of call centre operations profitably. You can realize that the administrative costs of scheduling rise exponentially with the size of your active workforce. If you have more than 20 operators, you must seriously consider implementing WFM.
WFM algorithm works on collecting the data from automatic call directors and analyzing. The most important function of the WFM is the forecasting the demand. It may begin with the historical data, for instance, the data of the last month or the year. But then your analysts can project using assumptions that are specific to their organizations. Uncertainties and skewed responses for special days or seasons or release of new products may be accounted for. The analysis and the corrections help to tune the algorithm to forecast better results from the ongoing data.
Many times the Workforce Management involves factoring the multi skills requirements of the various functions in the same organization. Professional WFM software programs certainly take this in consideration also. An analysis of the nature or the type of the calls also helps to identify the nature of the bottlenecks to expect and the ways to resolve them. The organizations must also factor the possibility that certain unexpected situations can develop quickly and the systems must be put in place to handle the situations, otherwise the forecasts have no value if the system is not having flexibility to handle the situation realistically.
Once you get a reliable forecast, it is important to schedule the workforce accordingly. The multi skilled operators put special constraint on the scheduling. WFM software programs help you to schedule the workforce accordingly. But even here you need fine tuning of the system. That is because the efficiency of each agent or the length of time different issues take up and customer behavior can have quite variations thus upsetting the assumptions of the WFM scheduling algorithm.
It is necessary for the management to clearly arrive the financial implications of both under staffing and over staffing. When correlated with these figures the WFM output can certainly help you to achieve optimum returns from the operations.
