Workforce Management

Staffing can be one of the biggest challenges when managing a contact centre. Too many advisors can result in low agent utilisation and higher operating costs whereas having too few agents can lead to unhappy customers.

Enghouse Interactive Workforce Management encompasses all that you need to optimise staffing and customer service across your enterprise.

Our complete solution supports optimisation of your contact centre, back-office and even your branches and stores. Workforce Management provides everything necessary to effectively manage your staff, forecast demand, create schedules automatically, develop accurate and insightful reports and improve your overall customer service operation.

What is workforce management?

Workforce management is essentially management of employees or human resources. This means ensuring productivity and performance of employees in the workforce.

Workforce management also involves deciding on a set of results that employees are expected to achieve that are necessary for the business; whether it be long term growth or exceptional customer service.

Why is workforce management important?

Workforce management is important because a company relies on its workforce in order to survive and grow long term. Without proper workforce management, valuable tasks and important portions will be affected. For example if customer service is poorly managed, this can lead to a bad reputation for the company and negative word of mouth in the long term. Another example could be poor management of a specific department e.g. if the financial team is poorly managed; important reports and documents could be affected; affecting data and decision making.

Depending on the size and structure of your business workforce management may or may not be important to you. There may be certain areas of the company that require workforce management and others that don’t. Common departments that require workforce management can involve:

Human resources – hiring, payroll, administration, recruitment and employee performance

IT – diagnosing and fixing IT related issues, resolving help desk enquiries, maintenance, infrastructure, telephony and website management.

Customer service – customer satisfaction, service and resolved issues.

Finance – reporting, accounting, taxes and financial analysis.

Marketing and sales – advertising, branding, product management, strategy and data analysis.

Research and development – research, improving current products, and market research.

Workforce management allows companies to closely monitor the performance of these different departments closely so they can identify and improve performance overall leading to positive effects for the business. While not every single metric is important; the data gained from workforce management is important in optimising the business.

Workforce management systems or software are examples of how workforce management can be simplified – allowing more data to be tracked and reported so that clearer decisions can be made. An example of where this can be valuable is in large departments with many employees. With the massive change to working conditions from COVID-19, many employees are now working from home – so the importance of staying connected and being able to collaborate is crucial.

What is the business value of Workforce Management?

At its simplest, Workforce Management ensures your customer service organisation has the right person, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time – regardless of the method of contact. Not only ensures that organisations are meeting customer expectations but they are also empowering agents to influence their schedules and check how they are performing against KPIs.

Allowing organisations to effectively manage one of their most important assets; their employees. When agents become motivated; they feel they are contributing to the performance of the business which results in significantly lower attrition rates.

Benefits

  • Increase operational efficiency through accurate forecasts and effective planning
  • Respond quickly and effectively to changes in demand
  • Automated scheduling reduces administration time and costs
  • Optimised schedules reduces staffing costs
  • Reduce agent attrition through involvement and work-life balance
  • Increased agent productivity and revenues
  • Improve performance through reporting and training

The importance of Workforce Management

Hear what are the important aspects of workforce management

"P&O Ferries has been able to reduce contact centre budgets by 30%, whilst maintaining targeted levels of service. The efficiencies add up everywhere and this has allowed increased coaching/training times. Not surprisingly, employee turnover has dramatically fallen as a result. "

P&O Ferries

Enghouse Interactive Workforce Management

The first stage of the quality monitoring process is effective capture of agent activities for evaluation. This consist of both call recording and screen capture, enabling organisations to record what is being said on the telephone as well as capturing activity on the agent’s desktop.

A prerequisite for ensuring the right number of agents are available to match demand, is an accurate forecast that can be made for any interval of time; hours ahead or far into the future.

The solution uses historical data and takes parameters such as customer behaviour patterns, response targets, skills, opening hours and contact channels and other long range factors are all taken into consideration. The result is an accurate calculation of the optimal number of agents required to meet customer demand.

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Our solution facilitates optimal workforce scheduling on the basis of multi-skill and multichannel forecasting, the placement of agents in multiple locations, agent preferences, local work regulations and company policies.

In addition, priorities can be given to the various skills, so that mission-critical capabilities are always available. The resulting schedules will consistently meet customer’s demand.

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Keeping track of agents skills in order to plan for training and recruitment is a challenging task. Our solution tracks and manages agent’s skill sets, levels, employment status and job criteria. Supervisors can quickly review future training and the skill development of each individual agent, as well as highlighting missing skill sets and guiding recruitment

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Make sure you evaluate your processes for improved profitability, with a large number of analysis tools our solution enables managers to conduct a detailed evaluation of contact centre performance in order to plan future initiatives for enhancing customer service effort and/or reducing personnel costs.

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