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Workforce management (WFM) is a business practice, a team of people and a set of technologies and tools used to address a set of essential needs of the contact center. The most fundamental question in workforce management is, “how many workers do we need to handle all of our anticipated work, optimized for an acceptable level of delivery of service, with the right mix of skills and cost?” In other words, the right people at the right time, with the right skills in the right place (remote or on-premises) for the right cost and the right level of delivery of service.

Workforce management (WFM) is a business practice, a team of people and a set of technologies and tools used to address a set of essential needs of the contact center. The most fundamental question in workforce management is, “how many workers do we need to handle all of our anticipated work, optimized for an acceptable level of delivery of service, with the right mix of skills and cost?” In other words, the right people at the right time, with the right skills in the right place (remote or on-premises) for the right cost and the right level of delivery of service.

Adherence management includes not only real time alerting when activity exceeds business norms but also historical trending of adherence and compliance to scheduled activities and goals. Self-service provides automated ways to request schedule changes, trades, etc., evaluated by business rules that ensure personal and team limits, as well as service delivery capacity limits are maintained, yet also provide a way for staff to have automated flexibility while significantly reducing load on management staff to focus on higher value tasks like working with customers and employee skill development.

The most common key performance indicators (KPIs) in workforce management will change over time  as your business changes, your workforce practice matures and as new challenges arise – new types of work, new groups of staff, merging operations, splitting out operations into separate units, etc., are all challenges of a modern enterprise. Some metrics which are inputs from the external systems that route the work which the staff you manage will process, these could be ACDs, dialers, chat routers, messaging routers, video call routers, back-office routing systems, or even unrouted work manually counted and tracked.  The unit of work depends on the type of media being handled, often these are generically referred to as contacts, however, they could represent an inbound or outbound voice connection, a chat conversation, a direct message conversation over social channels, a video connection including audio, an email ora back-office task such as a step in a mortgage application approval process, etc.

Examples of these types of metrics are contacts offered, contacts handled, wrap up time, handle time, handling characteristics of messaging contacts and more. These are useful in forecasting future work volumes and monitoring current activity. Another group of metrics to track are related to the employees you manage, not only their performance – how many contacts of what type are being handled, but also how actual activity and scheduled activity compare. Additionally, metrics related to how many employees are connected to work queues over time can be useful when managing relationships with staffing outsourcers. The final set of metrics to consider are real-time agent information used in the comparison of assigned activity to actual activity — this information is best used to manage deviations that are outside of business norms.

Alvaria Workforce has a comprehensive set of functions allowing administrators, business analysts and employees to view and manage their workforce duties in the office or on the go. In addition, Alvaria Performance has a pre-build integration with Alvaria Workforce and offers dozens of metrics which can be managed as KPIs based on your unique needs.

Employees are measured by performance goals on the work they perform, individually and as a comparison to their team or cohort of similarly skilled and proficient staff. Examples of performance goals could be average handle time (AHT), which is a metric used to measure the length of a customer phone call and first call resolution (FCR), which is when the customer’s issue is resolved by an agent within the first call made. Employees can also be measured by their adherence and compliance to assigned activities. Supervisors can be measured by team performance in terms of work as well as employee metrics. Workforce business analysts can be measured based on metrics like forecast accuracy (the difference between forecasted calls offered and actual calls made divided by forecasted calls offered), timeliness of delivery of planning tasks, and response to the unexpected like higher call volumes, data incidents, website crashes and so on.

The tools used in workforce planning are typically tools that accept data from routing platforms and build them into historical models, then forecast from those historical models or to override any component with business user supplied information. There are tools to perform the art and science of scheduling – whether it’s template based, preference based, work or equity rule based – assign employees to schedules or implement tools to let employees build their own schedules, compare plans to actual activity as it occurs and identify when deviations are of enough magnitude to act, take a variety of actions to deal with over or understaffing, see employee performance and adherence & compliance to assigned activities, historically and in real time, manage the workforce on premise, on the go, hybrid employee work arrangements, manage relationships with outsourced staffing vendors and clients of outsourced staffing vendors, and finally there are tools to notify interested parties automatically or via business user ad hoc broadcast notifications.

In order to develop an effective workforce strategy, organizations need to get all your constraints out on the table such as union rules, established practices, employee requests, types of work, types of media, types of service delivery goals, hours of operation etc., identify what other departments impact you and what departments you impact. Identify which constraints are hard aka workforce team cannot influence, identify which are soft, such as employee surveys, employee participation in planning, partnering with other lines of business who are your upstream or downstream connected teams in workflow or customer flow, and identify your planning cycle like how often you will forecast, schedule, track and use what you learned for the next phase of planning. When are plans, schedules, analysis due? How much down time in the cycle is needed for evaluation and change each cycle for continuous improvement?

Contact center workforce software is a set of tools used by managers of call centers and contact centers to monitor forecast volumes and staffing requirements. This ensures the right agents with the right skills are in the right seat at the right time to meet service optimization and cost optimization goals. Contact center workforce software allows staff to be scheduled in a way that is compliant with company requirements, employee preferences, regional or industry rules and union requirements and track performance vs plan as it occurs and identify and take steps to deal with overstaffing and understaffing scenarios as they are identified. This suite of tools also enables supervisors and direct line management staff to track their line of business and employee's performance and adherence, to maintain current schedules. In turn, this allows employees the visibility they need into their assigned work plans, tools to request changes for automatic evaluation, to understand their performance goals and level of achievement of those goals.