Workforce Management: Bringing predictability to business operations

By Ruchika R. Gill As it is said, it’s never difficult to go through a predictable situation in life even if it’s a crisis, but what’s more than difficult is, when a situation catches us unaware and we don’t know how to react; leading to ‘not so pleasant’ life experiences. So the key is simple: plan well and be pro-active instead of reactive to ensure successful outcomes in life. The saying doesn’t apply to just our personal life, but to business too. Any organization that plans its business well has much better chances of long term success than others. [caption id=“attachment_903931” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Reuters[/caption] A famous quote by Benjamin Franklin goes, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” For every minute spent in planning, an hour is earned. And in my view, workforce management tool is all about creating that perfect plan for your business operations and ensuring long term success. To define precisely, Workforce Management (WFM) is a platform that enables any organization’s business unit – front office (multi-media customer care center, retail branches or telesales center, collections center etc.) or a back office, to create a business plan pro-actively by forecasting contact volumes along with the human capital required to meet desired business goals for respective business unit, for next day, month or years, based on historical trends/patterns and other business parameters. The exercise ultimately helps companies plan their hiring strategies, technology infrastructure investments, overall budgets including facility costs roll-out of marketing activities, promotions, human capital etc. in a much more efficient manner. Let’s understand few important elements that a WFM Plan should take into account. First being the heart of a WFM platform, its forecasting algorithms. Analysis of historical contact volume data (calls data for voice based centers, tasks/work items volume for back office, emails or chat sessions for multi-media centers etc.) to form historical patterns, rightly complemented by key business parameters (like weightage, seasonality, holidays, etc.) to influence the forecast outcome, would ensure a holistic approach to generate the right plan. This element should account for various media types as well as their distinctive nature like voice being real-time, email being non-real time, chat being multi-session, back office with greater TATs,etc., to ensure forecast accuracy. The second element is also crucial: cost intensive asset of any organization— the human capital or workforce. As per analysts, any workforce directly constitutes approximately an average of 40-50% of organizational costs; it thus becomes highly crucial to plan this element in the most effective manner. Once an organization has workload/call volume visibility, they now need to ensure that right number of rightly skilled workforce is scheduled at the right time at right level to handle right type of work, to be able to achieve desired business goals. Business goals typically vary for each line of business, for example, an outbound collections process would want to increase ‘Promise to Pay’ rates; a customer care process would have 80/20 as their service level goal and most optimally planned workforce in number, schedule as well as skill type would help achieve those business goals. The workforce typically will have few dimensions attached to them like multi-skills, wages, AHT, occupancy, etc. and all these parameters need to be considered by WFM to ensure the most efficient and optimum workforce forecast as well as schedule for business processes. With the millennial population constituting majority of our workforce, ‘employee empowerment’ has acquired a new meaning. Employees now want to bid for shifts before their schedules are published; they want to see their own productivity metrics like AHT, service level for process or first call resolution etc. to improvise and make corrections themselves. While lot of organizations have started looking at those capabilities to be extended across employee base, many still prefer to go slow and extend the same to may be just top performers. This ensures a flexible work environment for employees and creates stickiness reducing attrition. I would put third element as “User Experience”. WFM came into existence in the 1970s and compared to any other technology platform, WFM adoption has been much slower in spite of the huge business value it delivers. One of key reasons for the same has been a highly difficult user experience. According to DMG Consulting, dealing with a hard-to-learn, complex and time-consuming user interface remains thenumber-one reason why companies stop using their WFM solution. This led to WFM exposure being limited to a small highly trained audience, hindering its widespread adoption. Attrition of limited pool of trained workforce became an even bigger issue. Over last few years, this concern has been attended to by industry vendors to an extent and efforts are still ongoing. With standards like Web 2.0 coming in, user experience for WFM has taken a leap forward and is now ready for mass adoption by organizations at all levels including WFM Team, employees, team leaders, directors as well as CXOs. As per a recent report by Markets and Markets, ‘World Mobile Applications Market (2010 – 2015)’ report, the total global mobile applications market is expected to be worth $25 billion by 2015 (up from about $6.8 billion in 2010) Mobile applications are the way to go and hardly any technology can survive in today’s world without incorporating ‘Mobility’. A perfect WFM plan would be left half executed without support for mobility. WFM Mobile Applications not only ensure real-time availability of key data to relevant employees but also help them take necessary actions with regards to forecast, schedules, etc. in real-time to ensure quick decisions in interest of business. Small, medium as well as large organizations continue to use manual methods of creating forecast plans for decades now and for few organizations, outcomes are as accurate as can be. But, the big missing element is the “Real-time” component which comes when WFM tools integrate with existing ecosystem like ACD, Dialer or say a QM platform. This integration ensures error-free automated approach to track actual data in real-time by comparing same with forecasted volumes or staffing & take immediate corrective actions,as needed. Effective pre-planning when done in WFM would ensure immediate effective actions with just few clicks. Employees who do not adhere to their schedules leading to lower First call resolution, higher abandon rates, lower service levels, can all be monitored & tracked in real-time with alerting mechanisms also built around parameters like ‘out of schedule’ adherence etc. leading to a disciplinary culture across organization. So, as we kickstart 2015, let’s get predictable by planning business ahead of time and be prepared to handle real-time events in a ‘more than ever’ effective manner to ultimately drive positive business outcomes.     The author is business manager - optimization solutions (India, Philippines & ME), Aspect Solutions.