WFM News   •   December, 2022

The contact centre industry is in an era of “multiplicity” – multiple channels of contact, a rich array of technology solutions and deployment options, and multiple delivery location choices on, near and offshore. That’s not to mention inhouse, insourced, outsourced and DBOT models.  But a revolution is underway adding yet another dimension to the industry, this time in the area of contact centre support functions. And that revolution is the managed service model.

The managed service model suits clients who regard line management of a contact centre as core business, but are happy to outsource technical and specialised functions such as technology, data analytics, knowledge management and workforce optimisation.

Workforce management (WFM)-as-a-service is an area to watch, predicted to grow quickly for the following reasons:

Access to talent

In many markets, the industry is growing and changing too quickly for many support functions to keep up. There is huge demand for true WFM specialists, but a shortage of supply, pushing costs up. WFM-as-a-service gives contact centres access to the industry’s brightest talent.

Economies of scale

As mentioned, talent is expensive. Technology can also be expensive. Both are even more difficult to afford in the small to medium-sized market. Purchasing technology and expert labour together as a bundled service can allow contact centres to spread that cost and take advantages of economies of scale.

Cost savings

These economies of scale can lead to significant cost savings, because support functions lend themselves to offshore delivery. Being able to keep your customer contact centre onshore but take advantage of offshore labour rates in support areas can lead to large savings, without compromising the quality of service to customers.

Access to technology

Maintaining state-of-the-art technology platforms means upgrading regularly, procuring the right supplier, and spending a lot of time and money, not to mention constantly retraining support staff. WFM-as-a-service means getting access to the latest technology through a service provider that enjoys a strong relationship with technology providers and is able to always stay on the cutting edge. Alternatively, if you have already invested in technology, a managed WFM service provider can offer expert knowledge and experience in the use of that technology.

Scalability

Software licenses and WFM specialists are generally required on a per agent basis. But staffing levels may vary dramatically throughout the year and can be subject to significant spikes, troughs or long term growth. WFM-as-a-service allows for a degree of scalability that cannot be easily accommodated internally.

Independent recommendations on resourcing

If you outsource your customer service, particularly to multiple vendors, then determining exactly to what degree your vendors should be staffing can present conflicts. Per call pricing motivates outsourcers to err on the low side, putting service quality at risk, while per hour pricing motivates them to err on the high side, increasing costs. Multiple vendors will often result in a lack of holistic enterprise-wide planning and real-time management. A provider of WFM-as-a-service will have an objective and holistic view aimed at balancing service levels and cost.

Adopting new channels

As contact centres offer new channels (such as chat or social media) and adopt new technologies, they face new challenges. A partner that has successfully implemented this change for other contact centres can save a lot of trial and error.

Experience

No matter what challenges you are facing in your contact centre, you are not the first. Someone else has encountered that problem before and solved it. Managed service providers allow you to delve into a wealth of knowledge and experience garnered from numerous industries and clients.

WFM-as-a-service offers contact centres, whether in-house or outsourced, whether large or small, a new opportunity to benefit from technology and expertise that would not generally be within their reach. The result of utilising these opportunities is more efficient service, greater customer satisfaction, higher employee engagement and significant cost savings

WFM News   •   September 2018

by Connor Bourke

1. Accurate Forecasting of volumes, shrinkage, attrition, AHT.

Any plan can only be as good as the inputs into the plan. Not only volume needs to be accurately forecast but also shrinkage, attrition and AHT. While we may be tempted to enter our targets for each of these, this leaves us exposed if there are factors negatively affecting these. Forecasts should be based on historical performance, adjusted for specific actions being taken to address this historical performance.

2. Timely hiring and training plans that give you the agents when you need them.

To maintain adequate staffing we need to forecast not only our requirements, but also our ability to meet them, and enter timely plans to do so. If we need 4 weeks to hire and 4 weeks to train new agents then hiring plans need to be complete a minimum of 8 weeks in advance

3. Capacity plans that warn you in advance when the demands on your contact centre will outgrow your capacity.

There is no point having the staff if we have nowhere for them to sit. Peak staffing needs to be measured against capacity and notice of exceeding that capacity needs to be delivered in enough time to make alternative arrangements.

4. Efficient scheduling that meets your contact demand as well as allows for employee preferences.

Obviously we need our schedules to meet our contact demand as closely as possible, but we also need to match other factors, including employee preference, requirements for team activities and labor regulations just to name a few. This is a difficult balancing act. If we could schedule agents without any limitations then we could create the perfect schedule set, one that matched contact demand exactly. With each rule, requirement or limitation we add we can only decrease schedule efficiency. Reality dictates that if we schedule agents in a way that affects them negatively (for instance constantly changing start times) or that leaves them unsupervised (for instance a schedule distinct from the rest of their team and their Team Leader) then performance will suffer, and schedule adherence will fall, meaning the schedules actually worked are even more removed from the requirements of contact demand. Balancing employee benefit with contact demand is a difficult art but one at which your WFM team need to be adept.

5. Effective real time management that helps operations teams adhere to schedule but also allows for changes in the schedule to accommodate queue level performance.

The best plan is worth little if it is not followed. And even the best plan can still go awry. Real time management is the art of ensuring the schedules we have created are followed, as well as managing any variance to plan.

6. Proactive addressing of any variance to plan

As volume, attendance, intraday shrinkage or AHT varies from plan, we can find ourselves either understaffed or overstaffed. The former means longer waits for customers and higher occupancy for employees, the latter means agents sitting idle. As your real time team see these factors begin to vary from plan, it is imperative to gain an understanding of the root cause of the variance, forecast the impact on the rest of the day and week and act accordingly. Actions can be taken to address AHT, shrinkage and staffing to bring the plan back into alignment.

7. Recommendations based on accurate, informative “what if” scenarios

A simple truth of contact centres is that things will change. Volumes and arrival patterns are fickle and may change. Employee preferences and customer expectations will vary over time. Legislation and technology will be introduced that changes the way we operate. New products will appear and old ones will be replaced meaning agents constantly need to be retrained and reskilled. And each of these situations leaves contact centre management faced with numerous choices, and sometimes few if any appealing choices. Your WFM department needs to be able to accurately predict the result of making (or indeed failing to make) these decisions, and provide informed, accurate recommendations as to what course to take.

8. Strong partnerships with Operations, marketing, support departments.

WFM is never an isolated process: we require input from other departments in creating a plan and need to work with other departments in executing the plan. Forecasting volume requires a thorough understanding of all call drivers. This means partnering with marketing, billing, technical support, branch teams and other departments to ensure any and all call drivers are factored in. Forecasting agent behavior and performance requires a partnership with operations and training departments. Scheduling all off line activity requires knowing what training, coaching and HR departments have planned. And holding the Operations teams accountable for adhering to the plan, as well as having changes to the plan actioned quickly requires an environment of trust and respect with Team Leaders and agents.

9. Effective Communication.

Everything mentioned above is only of any value if all stakeholders are aware and bought into the plan. Your WFM team need to be strong communicators and strong influencers. They need to know when to push back, when to provide multiple options or when to strongly recommend a single course of action.

10. Above all, a commitment to maximizing customer experience, employee satisfaction and efficiency.

If any of the above are missing in your WFM then Optima WFM can provide the solution. Whether through consulting and process mining to help your team deliver best practices, through effective training of your WFM team in the principles and practices of WFM or through hosting and managing your WFM, we can help provide your service delivery solutions with the effective planning and management to give your business the edge in today’s competitive customer service environment.

Through our partnerships with leading software solutions providers we can bring world class technology to your business without significant capital costs.

Through our offshore location in the contact centre capital of the world we can provide expert staff at significant cost savings.

Through our leadership team’s extensive experience in the industry we can provide your business with best practices learnt from around the globe.

Whatever concerns you are facing with your WFM, contact Optima WFM for you solution. Email us at info@optimawfm.com

Connor Bourke is the Chief Executive Officer of Optima WFM.

WFM News   •  July 2018

by Connor Bourke

How do you determine the right service level objective or ASA target for your contact centre? Speaking with many contact centre managers on this topic at a recent event I discovered the following:

1. Numerous different service level objectives existed but by far the most common I was quoted was 80% of calls answered in 20s, or an ASA of 20s
2. Approximately half of those quoting 80/20 or 20s ASA as their target referred to it as “industry standard” and/or “global best practice”
3. Other than this almost nobody could give me a reason WHY they set the service level or ASA target where they did.

So, is there any such thing as an industry standard ASA/SL target? And if not, how do we go about setting the right one for our centre?

Let me start by shaking things up a little. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN INDUSTRY STANDARD/BEST PRACTICE with respect to speed of answer. Customer expectations and needs will be different depending upon all sorts of factors. I have worked with emergency services lines and phone betting lines. Whether you need an ambulance or want to bet on the next race, 20, 30, 40 seconds might be too long to wait. On the other hand a customer calling with a technical problem may well find that hearing common trouble shooting tips while waiting to be answered can help resolve the issue and eliminate the need to speak to someone altogether. Customers contacting you via chat may have a different expectation than those calling. What constitutes good service can vary dramatically depending upon what your customers need and expect.

Setting an ASA/SL target.

If we were to ask our customers a direct question I am sure we would be told we should staff our centres to such a point that all calls are answered instantly. If we ask the money men, they would tell us to maximize Occupancy up to just short of the point of agent burnout. If we were to ask our agents I am sure they would tell us agent burnout sets in at about 70% occupancy. So how do we set the right ASA/SL target for our centre?

The answer is look at what works. A company’s intention for every call should be to satisfy, even WOW the customer. Now doing so depends upon a lot more than how quickly we answer the call, but we also know that making a customer wait too long can result in abandonment (and so we lose the opportunity to satisfy the customer) or in a customer who is cranky and much harder to please.

As such to set our speed of answer target right, we should look at these metrics alongside our historical speed of answer data. The point at which abandonment becomes an issue or the point at which customer satisfaction falls away sharply is the point at which we have already made our customers wait too long.

Measuring ASA/SL impact on customer experience.

Consider the following two charts taken from two separate contact centres.

The first tells us the impact speed of answer (as measured by ASA) has on abandonment. This is not difficult to understand, the longer we make customers wait, the more customers will simply give up. They may try an alternative channel to reach us, or they may hang up and contact a competitor. In this example we see that abandonment picks up dramatically where our ASA is above 30. This is customers telling us that 30s is too long to wait for the service they will recieve when answered. (I have seen some centres use average time to abandonment to give themselves an indication of what customers will put up with. This is not a good measurement.

ATA does not tell us how long customers are prepared to wait. If we are answering calls quickly, then ATA will also be low. This is simply because the customer who would hang up after 60, 90 or 120 seconds is answered before they abandon. ATA has told us more about our speed of answer than it has about our customers’ expectations.)

Based on this data we would look to set an ASA target of at most 30s.

The second tells us the impact speed of answer (this time measured as % of calls answered in 60s) has on Customer Satisfaction results. Again we see that customer satisfaction drops off dramatically at a point, this time as SL falls below about 70%. Calls anwered in an interval where SL was 70% answered in 60s or higher had a 78% satisfaction rate (measured as 7 or higher) while calls answered in intervals where SL was lower than 70% only had a 30% satisfaction rate. Customers are again telling us what is a satisfactory SL to aim for. (This may not be a direct result of the wait – when service level is low, occupancy is high and so agents get burned out and will provide a lower level of service once the customer gets to them, but either way, the result is that customer satisfaction is impacted by our ability to staff the centre to answer calls in a given amount of time).

Based on this data we would look to set a SL target of answering 70% of calls in 60 seconds.

I used ASA in the first example and SL in the second. This was merely to show that either can be a used, not because one fits the other better (although bear in mind swapping ASA for SL will make the graph slope in the opposite direction). Nor should anyone look to the results of these two cases as an answer for their centre. The point is no matter which measure we use, we are looking for a point at which abandonment blows out, or at which customer satisfaction drops off dramatically.

Capacity based ASA/SL targets.

So this is all very well, but often we suffer from capacity or budget constraints that prevent us from staffing beyond a certain level. I have seen arguments that the SL target we wish to achieve should be set to fit within this capacity constraint. I understand this thinking – there is no point setting a target that cannot be achieved. But this is short term thinking (and so is fine for applying to next week or even next month) but should not be allowed to impact your ability to deliver service to your customers, and so your share of whatever market you are in, in the long term. Setting a long term SL standard based on what you can do in the short term, rather than what the customer expects will result in

1. a self fulfilling prophecy. If we have worked out that we can only achieve 60/30 service level given our current volume and capacity should we be surprised or patting ourselves on the back when we consistently achieve that standard?
2. higher abandonment meaning we lose the opportunity altogether to wow that customer
3. lower customer satisfaction despite supposedly meeting our metrics
4. agent burn out

All of these will cost the business, most likely far more than increasing capacity and staffing to the levels our customers expect.

So ask yourself – “how did our speed of answer metric come about?” Are we just following a mythical industry standard (that may be lower or even higher than your customers expect and demand) or did we really think it out. Even if the answer is that it was set for a reason, reviewing that standard periodically is a good idea, customer expectations can change, with time.

Connor Bourke is the Chief Executive Officer of Optima WFM.