NewGen WFM: The Future of Contact Center Forecasting and ... of WFM 3 21 16_Final.pdf · The new approach to WFM creates trade-offs – it gives people who sign up for what is often

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NewGen WFM: The Future of Contact Center Forecasting

and Scheduling March 2016

Sponsored By:

- i - © DMG Consulting LLC

Table of Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 The WFM Challenge ............................................................................................. 2 An Employee-Centric Approach to WFM .............................................................. 3 The Enterprise Perspective ................................................................................... 5 Final Thoughts ...................................................................................................... 9 About Intradiem................................................................................................... 11 About DMG Consulting LLC ................................................................................ 11


Introduction

Imagine a world where people want to work in a contact center because of its flexible schedules, variety of work and career opportunities. A great deal has to change for this to happen, but technical innovation and ingenuity in the service industry have made the concept of just-in-time resource management, where real-time demand meets real-time supply, a reality. The balance of power between employers and employees is equalizing, which stands to benefit all constituencies – customers, companies and workers. Uber got it right, and there are many happy Uber drivers, which is translating into happy passengers (customers). The Uber concept is simple – invite entrepreneurial people to utilize their personal vehicles to meet the demand for transportation. Allow drivers to join and leave the workforce anytime they want, and use pricing differentials to motivate and reward them for taking on undesirable or high-demand shifts. This results in an empowered, engaged and highly satisfied group of drivers (the workforce) who set their own schedules and have strong upside earning potential. This in turn, makes for happy and satisfied customers. This process is enabled by technology that supports a new demand and bidding model, which adapts in real time to changing market dynamics. In the contact center world, this is the forecasting and scheduling model that is impacted by fluctuations in actual transaction volume. In the case of Uber, passengers have as many options as drivers, which is the opposite of what happens in contact centers, where agents are at the mercy of their management. Uber passengers can accept or reject a price and driver, and can use alternative transportation anytime they want. And both sides – drivers and passengers – rate each other. Unlike the Uber model, the contact center staffing model has never worked well, which is why these departments have the highest attrition rates in most organizations. Agents have little control over their schedules and almost no flexibility, which drives them to look for new opportunities. Companies invest a great deal in hiring and training employees who often do not stay long enough to allow the organization to recoup its investment. As a result, service quality suffers, because the organization doesn’t have enough employees available with the right skills needed to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Now consider the potential of applying Uber’s real-time resource bidding and management concepts and practices to contact center workforce management. There is no downside, only opportunity. See Figure 1. The challenge is that for this to happen, a new generation of WFM applications that supports this model has to be introduced to the market. This white paper provides the framework for


a NewGen WFM; solutions that balance the needs of employers and agents to ensure that customers receive the best service throughout their entire journey. Figure 1: The Uber-ization of WFM

Source: DMG Consulting LLC, March 2016

The WFM Challenge

Since the beginning of call centers, WFM solutions have been used to optimize performance by forecasting the volume of incoming work and then scheduling the staff to meet a targeted service level at the lowest cost for the organization. For most of the last 35 years, little to no consideration has been given to employee scheduling needs or preferences. Managers may care a great deal about their employees, but they are motivated (and rewarded) for keeping operating and staff costs as low as possible, which negatively impacts employee satisfaction. During the past 10 years, some WFM vendors have claimed to offer solutions that allowed companies to optimize for contact center productivity or staff satisfaction. Some WFM vendors purported that their scheduling techniques and algorithms could find a balance between these two opposing requirements. Unfortunately, there has been no way to determine if the solutions are effective in balancing enterprise requirements and employee preferences. Most contact


center agents will tell you that they are not happy with their schedules and lack of flexibility in making changes. But this is only one part of the problem. Contact centers have to be staffed at all times with employees who have the right skills to meet the needs of customers and prospects. This means that contact center agents cannot take a break when the mood (or nature) strikes them, or depart unexpectedly to handle a family emergency, without a negative impact on service level and customer satisfaction. And when there are unexpected changes in transaction volumes, supervisors or workforce administrators have to manually juggle agent schedules, something they don’t want to do because it is a time-consuming and frustrating task. As a result, no one is truly happy with the current state of WFM solutions and best practices. Agents feel captive, supervisors resentful and WFM administrators over-burdened with low-value activities. This dissatisfaction is evident in the negative feedback and high agent attrition rates that have always plagued contact centers. Companies have invested heavily in initiatives to alter the image and perception of their service and sales environments, but the problems remain the same, and staff attrition keeps increasing. This is because the fundamental issues remain – employees want to be treated with respect, which means fair pay and schedule flexibility. But even the most caring companies and managers have been able to do little to fix this problem because they must have workers to handle customers, and few companies can afford to pay for extra staff to be available on a contingency basis.

An Employee-Centric Approach to WFM

Imagine a new world of WFM, one that strikes a balance between organizational requirements and employee needs. Organizations will run forecasts to gain an understanding of staffing and skill requirements, just as they do today. They will figure out how many agents (or back-office/branch workers) they need for every 5-, 10-, 15-minute, etc. increment of every day of their forecast period. Organizations will hire resources with the skills and available hours to meet these needs. The difference is that organizations will look to create a pool of resources who can decide whether or not they want to work. Employees will commit to work a certain number of hours and provide their schedule preferences, but they will be able to alter schedules, swap hours, request overtime, opt for voluntary time off, etc., using a new generation of self-service tools that are not dependent on the traditional restrictive and inflexible shift paradigms. In the world of NewGen WFM, employees will bid on the working hours they want and will do their own scheduling from mobile devices, which will free supervisors and WFM administrators from these tedious and time-consuming administrative tasks. Automated and flexible decisioning and workflow tools that are driven by pre-


defined rules will be used to grant or deny schedule and intraday management changes. But this is just the beginning of the new world of WFM. Employees will be invited and encouraged to submit their scheduling needs. Schedule flexibility will attract workers to contact centers – the polar opposite of today’s hiring challenges! A new generation of WFM solutions will prioritize employee schedule preferences. And it gets better. Employees will be recognized and rewarded (where allowed by law) for outstanding performance, using gamification tools that provide full visibility and transparency. (This resolves a couple more major complaints about contact centers – unfairness and lack of employee recognition.) Contact center staff will be able to swap schedules to cover emergencies, just like their peers in other operating areas. Employees will be able to request a change in their break time to speak to their child’s doctor or teacher, a concept that is unheard of today in most contact centers. See Figure 2 for a graphical depiction of the process flow. Figure 2: NewGen WFM Process Flow



This is beginning to sound like a worker’s paradise with one-sided benefits, which it isn’t. Contact centers are tough operating environments. Employees are required to know a great deal of information, have to interact with the public who may be belligerent, and handle the stress of an ongoing stream of calls, emails, SMS, social media, back-office work, etc. The new approach to WFM creates trade-offs – it gives people who sign up for what is often a low-paying/high-stress job the reward of scheduling flexibility and job variability. This is a great way to attract workers to contact centers and back-office departments as WFM solutions are rolled out throughout organizations.

The Enterprise Perspective

Contact centers, back offices and other operating departments must forecast workloads, determine resource requirements, build optimal schedules, and identify employees with the right skills to meet these needs, to make customers happy. Employees, however, are opposed to inflexible fixed schedules. NewGen WFM solutions address this challenge by prioritizing employee schedule needs and preferences while meeting enterprise schedule requirments. If an agent has not indicated that they are available to work at a certain times, they will not be scheduled to work in that interval. WFM solutions will be re-architected to address 5-minute (and possibly 1–minute) time increments, instead of fixed shifts. These changes will make a major difference and will allow the new solutions to support a variety of schedules. (The underlying architecture, technology and database of the solutions make a difference; the new WFM solutions will be built with flexible technology that updates and processes much more quickly than the solutions of 20 – 30 years ago.) Here’s how this will work – after forecasting workload requirements, the organization will communicate its scheduling needs to its employees. When employees are hired, they will commit to working a certain number of hours every day or week, just as they do today. However, employees will be allowed to bid on alternative hours without being penalized, and if they cannot meet their full commitment one day or week, they can make up the time in a different period. (Agents will be allowed a specified number of exceptions per month or year.) This alone will dramatically reduce shrinkage and overtime costs. Employees who want more flexibility and opportunities can sign up to take on additional responsibilities. While they will have to interview for jobs and demonstrate the required aptitude and skill, once they are hired they will be trained. This gives employees greater career opportunities while keeping outstanding workers with great skills in the organization. By retaining highly skilled and proficient agents and giving them opportunities to work in other departments, such as back offices, sales or marketing, service quality will improve, as will the overall customer journey. Everyone wins – employees, enterprises and customers.


Intraday Management is Key

A key component of the NewGen WFM concept is the intraday management solution. Intraday management is where, in response to actual transaction volumes varying from forecast, schedule changes happen in real time on an automated basis. The intraday management module is a just-in-time scheduling engine that is based on a real-time demand model, as is Uber. It will be enabled by a rules and decisioning engine that can automate the process of identifying service level opportunities and then finding the right resources to address the needs. To do this, it will have access to the inventory of agent skills and availability as well as the ability to communicate on a bi-directional basis using SMS or chat, as reaching agents on a timely basis is critical for success. These fundamental capabilities must be supported by a bidding module. In the world of NewGen WFM, companies will motivate employees to take on additional working hours, overtime or non-preferred shifts by using a combination of variable compensation and other perks. However, all changes will be validated for adherence to regional work rules and regulations prior to being approved. The intraday management system must also come with both Web-based and smartphone app-based bidding tools to allow employees who are onsite and those who are outside the office to respond immediately to requests for schedule changes, overtime and voluntary time off. See Figure 3. Figure 3: Intraday Management is the Heart of NewGen WFM



Mobility will be instrumental in many aspects of NewGen WFM solutions. Mobile and Web-enabled self-service applications will allow employees to self-manage their schedules. This will eliminate the need to ask (or beg) a supervisor to authorize a schedule change or vacation request, and reduces the time supervisors will have to spend manually dispositioning requests. Schedule requests will be decisioned automatically by a rules engine that is “blind” to the person making the request, further eliminating claims of favoritism. Operational imperatives – such as prioritizing the needs of top performers as identified by the gamification, quality assurance, performance management or other department systems or priorities – will be used to drive decisions. Changes in Culture and Best Practices Drive Success

Technology is the enabler, but for the new approach to WFM to be successful, enterprise executives and contact center leaders must be on board with the cultural shift: a transition that demonstrates to employees that they are highly valued resources. In the world of NewGen WFM, instead of hiring the smallest number of employees and training people only on a must-have basis for a specific task, companies will need to expand the number of resources who are trained to work in their contact center. (This is where effective long-term planning software comes into play.) If organizations break down the walls between front- and back-office operating departments, the addressable pool of resources available to staff all departments will grow, as will the variety of work. This will allow contact center resources to perform back-office work when there is a slow period, and for back-office employees to handle contact center interactions when the front office is understaffed. A top enterprise servicing goal is to make it easy for customers to conduct business. Eliminating organizational silos and improving cross-functional cooperation will help companies achieve these goals, but will require major changes in how businesses operate. The new intraday management modules provide the infrastructure to support these changes, but for organizations to realize the greatest benefit from these tools, they need to retrain their managers, supervisors and WFM administrators to take a more creative approach to staffing. Organizations will need to start using flexible evaluation and compensation models that take into consideration each employee’s range of skills, quality scores, customer satisfaction ratings, productivity and effectiveness. They will have to revise static overtime compensation plans and introduce pay-for-performance strategies to motivate behaviors that build employee engagement and customer satisfaction. Companies will also need to change their age-old preference for full-timers so that they can realize the benefits and flexibility of using a part-time workforce.


These changes will greatly improve employee satisfaction, make jobs more interesting and rewarding, create better career opportunities (even for people who want to remain on the clerical side of the business), and reduce operating costs while giving front-end employees scheduling flexibility. The one “catch” is that, at present, this new methodology will likely work only for companies with a large enough staff to support the mathematical models, which DMG estimates to be a minimum of 250 workers in the front and back office. Even with this limitation, this is the first big change in WFM since these solutions were introduced.

Benefits of NewGen WFM

It’s well past time to improve the way contact centers forecast, hire, staff, train and schedule employees. The business world and customer and employee expectations have changed dramatically since WFM solutions were first introduced, yet managers and WFM administrators continue to stick with outdated systems, methods, algorithms and practices, as this is what they know. To be fair, until recently, there were few alternatives, but this is starting to change. NewGen WFM is the future of WFM. It is a future that will yield great benefits for customers and enterprises, including contact centers, administrators and agents. The enhanced WFM solutions will deliver on promises never met by the current WFM solutions, which are, at best, productivity tools, and at worst, a primary driver of employee dissatisfaction and attrition. Figure 4 provides a high-level summary of the benefits organizations should expect. These benefits will greatly improve the internal and external perception of contact centers. They will improve service quality and enhance the brand while developing internal knowledge and expertise that will improve the customer journey inside and outside of the contact center. This will make it easier for customers to do business with the company, which should help to grow revenue. From a staff perspective, NewGen WFM will help to create a different breed of agents. This will be a cohort of highly satisfied and engaged employees who enjoy the benefits of flexible schedules and work choices. This will improve productivity while reducing overtime and shrinkage costs. If schedules are set up and managed properly, the need for overtime should be greatly reduced, which is a double benefit, as forced overtime is a primary cause of employee dissatisfaction today. NewGen WFM solutions will make it easier for managers to use part-timers, which will greatly increase the pool of available resources. Well-managed contact centers will become employers of choice; organizations where all employees are treated with fairness and respect and have more options than in traditional 9-to-5 jobs.


Figure 4: Benefits of NewGen WFM


Final Thoughts

DMG is proposing a world where employees specify their schedules, and companies optimize department requirements based on staff availability and the ability to share resources between departments. Organizations will also be able to call upon contingency workers, possibly part-timers who are paid only when they work, which represents another major shift for many companies. It will still be necessary to support last-minute schedule changes, but these modifications will be handled by automated decision rules, so there will be little to no impact on supervisors, who will receive alerts about these changes instead of having to invest time and energy into making them. The question is whether your company is willing to transform its front- and back-office culture and management practices. Are your company and managers ready to accept a working


environment where flex schedules are a priority, instead of demanding compliance from agents who are not going to deliver? After 35 years, it’s clear that trying to force agents to adhere to inflexible schedules is not an effective management technique. It took a push from the Millennial generation to wake up the market to poor and ineffective WFM applications and staffing practices, but the changes that are underway are going to make a major difference to the companies that adopt and implement them. The new challenge will be to hire supervisors and managers who “get it” and can work in the new environments. Companies that invest in the new generation of flexible, self-service, and mobile-enabled WFM solutions and who are willing to re-think their entire staffing paradigm are going to become employers and companies of choice. These organizations will better engage their employees which will reduce hiring, training and shrinkage costs, while improving the customer experience by having the right employees available to help customers. Contact centers will always be challenging places to work, but with scheduling flexibility and the right practices and managers, they will attract a new generation of workers who prioritize a work/life balance and are dedicated to delivering great service to customers who depend on them.


About Intradiem

At Intradiem, we envision a world where customers get real-time service from real-time frontlines.

Our patented, SaaS-based Intraday Automation technology automates intraday management

processes and triggers real-time workforce adjustments in response to changing business

conditions. By transforming frontline workforce operations from manual and reactive to automated

and responsive, Intradiem creates agile, real-time frontline workforces that are always prepared,

always productive and never caught off-guard. Over 250,000 frontline workers use Intradiem's

solution every day.

About DMG Consulting LLC

DMG Consulting LLC is a leading independent research, advisory and consulting firm specializing

in contact centers, back-office and real-time analytics. DMG provides insight and strategic

guidance and tactical advice to end users, vendors and the financial community. Each year, DMG

devotes more than 10,000 hours to producing primary research on IT sectors, including workforce

optimization (quality management/liability recording), speech analytics, workforce management,

performance management, desktop analytics, surveying/voice of the customer, customer journey

analytics, text analytics, cloud-based contact center infrastructure, dialing, interactive voice

response systems and proactive customer care. Our actionable solutions are proven to deliver a

lasting competitive advantage, and often pay for themselves in as little as three months. Learn

more at www.dmgconsult.com.

http://www.dmgconsult.com/

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NewGen WFM: The Future of Contact Center Forecasting and ... of WFM 3 21 16_Final.pdf · The new approach to WFM creates trade-offs – it gives people who sign up for what is often