TOOLBOX: WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT
Who's on first?
Scheduling, monitoring agents for the right calls at the right time proves to be a tough balancing act
By Richard Sawyer
T he old adage that companies must deliver the highest level of customer satisfaction while doing so affordably is truer than ever with the recession now out of the starting gate. If you're in the market for a workforce management (WFM) solution linked to your contact center, responding to customer needs quickly is critical across all aspects of the value chain. A solid WFM installation can assist service executives in meeting their customer relationship and resource management goals.
A s more finished goods manufacturers, electronics and computer firms, and software providers see a greater share of their end-user sales being handled by distributors and resellers, it is more important than ever to get customer service right. Balancing work to be completed with the resources available - the key purpose of a WFM solution - will help ensure that whatever the volume of your call center, you can flexibly meet all customer inquiries while doing so in the most efficient possible way.
There are numerous vendors offering workforce management solutions ( see box ). CC News talked with some of WFM's leading consultants and analysts, and a sampling of users, to determine the key factors you should consider when specifying and sourcing a WFM solution that's right for you.
Size Matters
"Manual workforce management processes will not work when the contact center has more than 60 agents," according to AMR Research, Inc.'s recent report, "When to Buy Contact Center Workforce Management. "In most cases, contact centers with less than 60 agents can schedule service reps using spreadsheets and monitor the quality of customer service by having a manager walk the floor. However, once the agent workforce grows beyond 60, these manual processes fall apart, forcing users to turn to technology for help."
The report, authored by analysts Lindsey Higgs and Joanie Rufo at AMR's headquarters in Boston, noted that contact center workforce management software helps address critical management challenges.
They went on to say the "recipe for great service"-assuring the highest-quality customer service-requires contact center managers to provide their workstations with three ingredients:
-The right contact - capturing the interaction and using intelligent routing to get it to the appropriate agent's desktop, based on type of inquiry, type of customer, and agent skill set.
-The right information - pulling the relevant customer, product, and order information from customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), billing, knowledge management and other systems, and,
-The right person - a person who is fully trained, has a pleasant attitude, and is scheduled to work the most appropriate shift.
In the most well-equipped contact centers, these three aspects are backed by analytics technology, which is used to constantly monitor and improve the service experience for customers. The traditional workforce management model for contact centers is expanding its reach and influence in the organization. And with the recession on, it's critical to insure that your call center, fulfillment and service technicians are serving the customer in the most efficient way possible.
"Over the years companies would get their phone switch, phone, desktop, and, then they'd put in an IVR (interactive voice response) capability," explained Daryl Gonos, senior partner, Workforce Management Group, Delray Beach, Fla. "Subsequently, they'd realize they'd need to optimize their workforce. Workforce management was perceived as a luxury item for a non-mission critical application. People who understand how important workforce management is to enterprise efficiency and the customers' satisfaction know that the tools provide them much more value: When people think workforce management, they think forecasting and scheduling."
Gonos concurs with AMR Research's findings that above a certain number of contact center agents it is impossible to optimize WFM scheduling. "Take any company," he explained. "Let's say you have a major insurance provider with 350 agents in two locations running off a Lucent or Avaya switch. It's not uncommon to have a single person attempting to forecast call volume and create schedules using an Excel spreadsheet. This insurance company could have a brilliant analyst, but no matter how good they are, they can't optimize scheduling with just a spreadsheet. A workforce management system can optimize an entire schedule in 20 minutes, reallocate breaks in shifts, consider lunch breaks and a host of other variables. If you gave that task to a single person, they couldn't do it efficiently.
"This is why the phone companies and airlines - huge firms with 150,000 agents - adopted this technology so early," Gonos continued. "But the critical perception is that the smaller your contact center, the more important your workforce management system-the more important that your agents are optimized properly. If you need 20 agents on the phone and 19 of them are all you have, the impact on service is much greater than if you've got 350 agents and you only have 349. The customer will wait much less time than among smaller call center operations. It's just as critical for the smaller application."
Of the 74,000-78,000 call centers throughout the country, only 10 percent have automated their processes with integrated solutions, Gonos said.
Once the threshold of 60 agents is surpassed, it's critical to automate as much of the process as possible. First, you'll want a WFM solution that can automatically determine the expected workload, and allocate resources. The system should also be able to handle widely divergent volumes of work that can vary daily or hourly. Without this ability to anticipate the volume of work, overstaffing or understaffing results. Overstaffing unnecessarily bloats the company's fixed costs, while under-staffing results in inferior service and growing customer dissatisfaction.
"There's a basic difference between a single site and a multi-site operation," explained Brian Spraetz, marketing manager, IEX, Richardson, Texas, a work-force management vendor. "The main thing is that the requirements are a little different with respect to how the system architecture fits into a multi-site operation and the flexibility it allows in managing the resources. Say you have four different call center sites and they want to consolidate the forecasting and scheduling as well as let the respective sites do individual scheduling. While a central location does the forecasting, you need to make sure that the software you're purchasing can fit your entire operation, from headquarters to satellite sites."
Forecasting is typically centralized because most companies have forecasting divisions or teams dedicated to look at call volumes, seasonally and annually. "It makes a lot of sense from an enterprise strategy point of view," Spraetz continued. "You can also look at operations as a whole. For most of our multi-site customers, there's a lot of hands-on management that goes on at individual sites."
Spraetz acknowledged that IEX does have some single sites and some customers do have less than 60 agents. "But configuring a workforce management solution is not just based purely on agent head count," he said. "It's also a reflection on the types of calls, whether they're long duration and short duration calls. If your center is open 9-5 with set hours, there's no need to have a scheduling function, but it can make sense to have an automated scheduling product if your call center is open 24 hours a day with several shifts."
"Buyers are usually driven by pain," Gonos said. "Or else someone in the organization recognizes the value before the pain becomes critical. If you choose a manual workforce management system there's someone painstakingly doing the difficult task of entering the call statistics from the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) into an Excel spreadsheet. Then they're trying to forecast a future week. They may be spending hours entering data.
"Most cost centers aren't as vanilla as you think-not many businesses offer just one 800 number," Gonos continued. "It's complicated by membership rewards, lost cards and many other different services. So, that person struggling without an automated WFM is entering data from many groups. And it's not just how many calls per day, but constant updates at 15-minute intervals. The key is offering customers excellent service by juggling 'x' number of service technicians, making the best use of them and handling exceptions, like when each technician should go to lunch, take their break or go home some afternoon to see their sick daughter. It gets very complicated."
Getting what you need in a complex market
While the markets for interaction management services and contact center software are large, the workforce management market is still comparatively small, according to AMR Research.
Some workforce management functionality is available from suite CRM and call center vendors, their report acknowledges. But the largest niche workforce management vendor is Witness Systems, a global provider of multimedia customer interaction recording, performance analysis and electronic learning management software (call and desktop recording, and e-learning), with $44 million in revenue for 2000.
Scheduling is such a predominant component need in the call center market that Aspect, Blue Pumpkin, CenterForce, IEX, Genesys and Pipkins are the companies most people think of when they are discussing workforce management. But other aspects like incentive management, key performance indicator tracking, call recording, desktop recording, scripts, e-learning and its sister, e-recruiting, have all become more sophisticated in the last few years.
If a company wants to purchase software to address all the critical workforce management issues, "it has to buy from no less than four vendors," the AMR Research report stated.
"Specialty vendors are hot today, but CRM suite players are starting to get active in workforce management."
Siebel Systems, for example, is expanding into the market with its new Employee Relationship Management (ERM) portal, which aggregates information for employees from human resources and other systems. Siebel and other CRM vendors will eventually add more pieces of workforce management, especially scheduling, to their suite offerings, the report noted.
"Every user we spoke with reported substantial benefits from their workforce management investments," the AMR Research report said. However, systems should be selected and deployed after considering the following:
- If you have more than 60 agents, some form of workforce management investment will probably benefit your contact center.
- When budget constraints allow room for only one workforce management investment, choose scheduling software first if your mix of skills, business hours, and time zones is complex. Buy quality monitoring first if you are managing hundreds or thousands of agents with little diversity in skill sets.
- Consider the fact that CRM suite vendors are starting to show interest in scheduling and forecasting applications. You may be able to get scheduling from your CRM vendor in the near future.
- To help you through the cultural issues involved in a workforce management implementation, take advantage of advice available from your vendor's professional services group or a system integrator with domain knowledge.
Call center managers today, though, are requiring workforce management solutions that go beyond the traditional earlier focus on the scheduling function. As IEX's marketing manager, Spraetz, explained: "Your workforce management system should try to consider the education of your people. There's more to it than just scheduling. It should do more; it's a management tool for measuring performance and measuring the level of service you're delivering to your customer."
IEX's workforce management system, TotalView, integrates with eOn Communications' eQueue, a single-cue routing for Web and voice interactions using the Linux open operating system. "The eOn system is basically an ACD product from our perspective," Spraetz stated. "We interact with it by collecting information from the contacts that are handled: when they occur, how quickly they are handled, volume, and we use that information to create the forecast for the upcoming week or two. It's flexible. You can do daily or monthly planning and forecasting, but it's often done on a weekly basis.
"Another way we interact with the eOn product, we get 15-minute updates so we can track and forecast call volume and alert call center managers and schedulers if there's a divergence from the goal or expectation," Spraetz continued. "They can then compare that to the forecast. We can give them a good idea of whether they'll be meeting their goals or not. It's an early warning system.
"Handling customer concerns and measuring agents on satisfactory completion of not just the call, but the customer problem, is important," Spraetz said. "We fine tune the cost side of that equation, to make sure our customers have the right number of agents each time of day. A workforce management product sets the stage for delivering service. It includes agent monitoring, customer surveys and other functions that need to be integrated into the entire service process. It can be set up to handle calls as efficiently as possible.
"Another important feature is that many people are using alternative contact methods now, and the system you buy should be able to handle e-mail, online Web chat and phone," Spraetz concluded. "You can do it with a single WFM system.
"Those are contact resources that need to be scheduled. The most efficient way to do it is with agents that can handle different methods through a product that can handle the varied calls with maximum efficiency. That means deciding where is the best channel to schedule that particular agent. If you have agents who are trained to handle multiple contacts, it's better to have them do multiple functions than dedicating them."
Users' success depends upon the vendor's experience in the contact center market, according to AMR Research.
When choosing a vendor, a good place to start is with one that has domain expertise in the contact center-a vendor that designed its product for the contact center's unique needs, rather than retrofitting existing functionality from outside the contact center market.
"Early leaders that fit this description include Witness Systems in quality monitoring, Aspect Communications and Blue Pumpkin in scheduling and Knowlagent in e-learning," the AMR Research report said.
"We're at the very early stages of this technological evolution, but people are beginning to recognize the impact of workforce management within the enterprise," Workforce Management Group's Gonos said.
"They're also beginning to recognize the link to warehousing and fulfillment. That phone call in the automated world is logged into the workforce management system.
"And forward-thinking workforce management vendors know that that call results in an action: Someone is ordering a shirt, then someone in the factory is packaging the shirt and finally, someone is shipping the shirt to the customer."
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