Today’s call centers are far more advanced than they once were. In today’s digital age, they are commonly referred to as contact centers because they handle high volumes of inquiries over many communication channels.
To handle all the complex staffing and operations of contact centers, managers use robust workforce planning approaches and tools to schedule employees, forecast future needs, and monitor contact center performance.
In this article, we will explain the nature of workforce management in call centers, detail the associated benefits and challenges, and provide a list of the top contact center workforce management software on the market today.
What Is Workforce Management in a Call Center?
Most large companies today use contact centers or call centers to manage customer interactions. These centers may be departments within the larger business or they can be outsourced to an external agency. Contact center workforce management (WFM) is a modern process for strategically managing call center and contact center teams.
This process involves managing all contact or call center processes, to ensure adequate staffing, efficient scheduling, and ultimately, optimizing employee performance and operational efficiency. Because contact center employees field calls and inquiries from so many different communication channels, call center WFM also involves schedules and shifts according to the unique skill sets of each employee. To coordinate all these different processes, contact center managers utilize software like a unified call center platform that can handle scheduling and forecasting as well as other aspects of employee and customer experience.
Key Components of Contact Center Workforce Management
Contact center workforce management processes can vary between businesses depending on factors like an organization’s industry, size, and goals. However, certain components are part of every contact center’s workforce management strategy:
1. Scheduling
An essential part of contact center WFM is schedule optimization. This process involves assigning shifts to ensure adequate staffing and assigning tasks to match each employee’s skills and knowledge while considering employee availability and preferences, SLA requirements, and business goals.
By using automation to organize call center agents’ shifts and daily activities, managers make operations more efficient, ensure adequate coverage as call volumes rise, and adhere to labor laws, contract terms, and employee preferences.
2. Forecasting
Predicting and projecting future call volumes, customer issues, and scheduling needs is vital to contact center WFM. Changes like promotions, product launches, economic fluctuations, and seasonal trends can all impact contact center operations and scheduling needs.
Contact center managers use WFM tools to track and analyze historical data on call volumes, email inquiries, and chat records to anticipate service demands, and automate agent schedule adjustments, leaving them more time to tend to other critical management tasks.
3. Attendance and time tracking
Forecasting and scheduling create a solid framework for contact center operations, but managers need to monitor attendance and activities in real time to keep operations running smoothly. WFM software allows managers to track live metrics and adjust as necessary to optimize budgets, lower operational costs, and improve customer satisfaction and compliance over time.
3. Performance monitoring
The final key component of contact center workforce management is agent performance monitoring. Contact center managers use benchmarks and other metrics like average handling time, first call resolution, and customer satisfaction to identify high-performing agents, pinpoint areas for improvement, and drive continuous improvement of workforce activities.
Managers can also use this information to identify high performers and provide training opportunities to others who are falling short.
Benefits of Contact Center Workforce Management
Strong contact center workforce management is not only beneficial to modern contact centers, it is essential. Managers can drive organization-wide progress by optimizing operations and work experience for call center teams. Here are some of the most commonly seen benefits of adopting a strong solution for contact center workforce management:
1. Improved staffing and resource allocation
The success of a call center hinges on the effectiveness of its agents. Managers, therefore, need to hire agents well-suited for each role on their teams, from customer service agents to account managers. They also need to ensure that each team memberhas all the training and resources they need to do their jobs effectively.
Effective workforce management strategies help managers accomplish these tasks by optimizing staffing processes and resource allocation, making for better customer service and fewer redundancies in the long run.
2. Increased agent productivity and efficiency
A strong workforce management process ensures contact center teams can keep up with call volumes without overstaffing. This delicate balance is made easier by modern software that uses historical data to help managers and agents make better decisions to reduce waste and increase productivity.
Using operations management software with smart automation features, managers can streamline scheduling and forecasting to keep the entire contact center running efficiently while producing detailed documentation and records.
3. Enhanced customer satisfaction and experience
Workforce management for contact centers reduces customer wait times and frustration and speeds up the resolution process. This benefit impacts the core of a call center’s purpose: serving customers.
WFM software automates the inquiry assignment process to ensure that customers are matched with agents with the appropriate skills and understanding to resolve issues the first time a customer calls. Ultimately, contact center workforce management ensures smoother agent workflows, leading to better overall customer experience.
4. Simplified scheduling processes
Managers of contact centers of all sizes need to build work schedules that satisfy organizational staffing needs, employee preferences and requests, and labor laws. A robust workforce management strategy can make it possible, even easy, for managers to accomplish this feat with workforce management software.
Many modern contact center tools and WFM applications automate staffing and scheduling to optimize schedules and include features to help employees manage shift swaps. This keeps agents happy, allowing them to provide exemplary service and help the contact center reach established business goals.
5. Accurate forecasting of call volumes
Contact center managers need to anticipate expected call volumes to schedule and equip their teams and keep operations running smoothly. An effective workforce management approach allows managers to use historical data to accurately predict the amount and types of customer inquiries expected for any given period of time.
This allows center managers to plan ahead, ensuring adequate staffing and avoiding customer frustrations to align call center operations with overarching business goals and ensure that service meets the terms of all service level agreements, including resolution and response times as well as agent availability.
6. Better regulatory compliance
A clear and streamlined workforce management stragengy makes it possible for contact center managers to create agent schedules that comply with labor laws. Modern WFM software allows managers to align scheduling practices with labor laws, and make updates as rules change.
This helps protect businesses from fines and liabilities while helping managers maintain fair scheduling processes and enjoyable working environments for their teams.
7. Real-time workforce insights
By conducting all workforce management activities through modern software, managers can streamline data tracking and analytics to continually monitor agent performance and schedule adherence. These insights give managers an up-to-date understanding of their workforce and make necessary changes to processes and schedulings based on real-time data.
The feedback loop of performance, analysis, and ongoing refinement lets managers evaluate strategies and refine workforce management process over time. This approach not only helps teams reach long-term goals, but also enhances customer satisfaction by continually raising service quality.
Workforce Management Challenges Specific to Call Centers
Call centers hang in the balance between organizations and the customers they serve, presenting unique challenges for managers. Here are some of the most common workforce management challenges specific to contact centers:
1. Fluctuating call volumes
Planning and forecasting are both essential to workforce management, but there is always a risk for unforeseen circumstances to cause spikes in inquiries. Situations like catastrophic weather events and system outages might have a huge impact on customer needs as well as agent availability.
2. High employee turnover rates
It is well known that call centers have high agent turnover rates. If the working environments within contact centers are not carefully maintained, managers risk having a workforce that feels stressed, unappreciated, and unequipped to be successful in their roles. This can lead agents to seek other opportunities, leaving managers with the responsibility of refilling those roles, costing the business in terms of time, resources, and funds.
3. Scheduling conflicts and inefficiencies
Contact center managers deal with a dynamic array of parameters when coordinating agent schedules. High levels of agent turnover, fluctuating call volumes, and unexpected scheduling changes, all make manual scheduling not only time consuming and error-prone, but inefficient. As a result, service quality, employee experience, and operational efficiency can all suffer.
4. Managing remote and hybrid teams
Today’s call centers are rarely physical, in-person workplaces. Rather, call center teams tend to operate with remote or hybrid teams. Overseeing remote agents and their activity in addition to all other workforce management tasks can be tricky. This can make it more difficult to ensure consistent performance, schedule adherence, and high productivity.
5. Balancing cost efficiency with quality
Contact center workforce management with cutting-edge software can be expensive, but these advanced tools make planning more manageable and efficient. Resource limitations can make operations less flexible and leave less room for agility and innovation at work. Contact center managers need to balance WFM costs with department budgets to keep contact center activities sustainable.
6. Addressing employee burnout and dissatisfaction
Interactions between agents and unhappy customers tend to be stressful, especially when agents are unable to provide successful resolutions . A combination of poor working culture, inadequate support, and high stress levels can lead to burnout and turnover. Rather than avoiding this problem, it is the responsibility of managers to counteract it before it happens.
7. Ensuring accurate forecasting
Predictions are only as good as the data used to formulate them. With so many different data sources, ensuring accurate predictions of customer inquiries and team scheduling needs can be difficult. If unaddressed, inaccurate forecasting can lead to mismatched staffing plans, lost resources, and decreased customer satisfaction.
8. Compliance with labor regulations
Labor laws dictate maximum working hours, overtime rules, and mandate breaks to ensure employees are treated fairly in the workplace. In certain industries, contact center managers have additional operational regulations to comply with. Failure to meet these requirements not only reduces employee satisfaction, but makes companies vulnerable to legal penalties and tarnished reputations.
Best Workforce Management Software for Contact Centers
Workforce management in contact centers involves many moving parts, but modern workforce management software is designed to help managers streamline agent activities and optimize call center operations. Here are some of the most effective WFM software on the market today.
1. NICE CXone Mpower
- G2 Rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars
- Pricing: Omnichannel agent starts at $110 per agent per month
CXone by Nice is a customer experience platform bolstered by AI. This platform allows contact center teams to automate every aspect of customer service interactions from forecasting to issue resolution. The CXone platform includes tools for workforce management, which managers can access via a centralized dashboard with tabs for call center forecasting and scheduling. It also has an intraday manager which provides insights into open agents, call volumes, and average handling time. Real-time adherence features let managers know how well agents are sticking to their assigned work schedules.
The CXone platform Integrates with other tools used by contact center managers through an open framework of hubs. It also includes pre-built solutions and apps within the CXexchange marketplace and a developer portal that allows teams to access APIs for a more customized setup.
Key features:
- Contact center AI copilot
- Real-time adherence insights
- Self-service customer support options
- Intraday manager
- AI-based forecasting and scheduling
2. Nextiva
- G2 Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
- Pricing: Core plan starts at $30 per user per month
Nextiva is a telecom infrastructure platform and customer experience management company that helps businesses create AI-powered customer experience solutions. Nextiva’s Workforce Engagement Management tools are designed to help contact center managers modernize their teams by centralizing activities into a centralized platforms, empowering agents with gamification, and supporting teams with AI-driven productivity tools.
Features like compliance recordings, performance analytics, and agent-facing knowledge bases make this solution a joy to use for managers and call center teams alike.
Key features:
- Virtual Agents
- AI-driven productivity tools
- Customizeable widgets
- Customs analytics dashboards
- Agent-facing knowledge base
- Compliance recordings
3. Talkdesk Workforce Management
- G2 Rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
- Pricing: CX Cloud Digital Essentials plan starts at $85 per user per month.
Talkdesk is an AI-powered customer experience platform with a powerful Workforce Engagement Management product. Talkdesk WEM uses AI to help contact center managers manage their agents and continually improve customer experience from a centralized platform.
This solution features an easy-to-use interface for administrators and end users, making it simple to create and streamline workflows for inquiry management. Its agent behavior insights allow managers to monitor and compare actual versus scheduled agent activities. Talkdesk WEM also improves agent experience with support for training and remote work, and AI chatbot that can processes change requests for flexible scheduling.
Key features:
- Intelligent forecasts, scheduling, and analytics
- Omnichannel support
- Personalized coaching
- Smart workflows for request management
- Adherence monitoring
- Talkdesk schedule mobile app
4. RingCX
- G2 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
- Pricing: RingCX starts at $65 per agent per month
RingCX by RingCentral is an omnichannel customer experience platform that uses AI to manage contact center operations, boosting customer interactions with AI-based self-service bots and other workforce engagement tools like advanced quality management, screen recording, and speech analytics.
RingCentral also offers an enterprise contact center solution with advanced capabilities like post-call speech analytics, advanced interaction analytics, and native workforce management. RingCentral products integrate with popular software like Zendesk, Hubspot, and ServiceNow.
Key features:
- Voice and over 20 digital and social channels
- Real-time and historical reporting
- Self-service chat-bots & AI virtual agents
- AI-based conversation analytics and quality management
5. Playvox Workforce Management
- G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
- Pricing: Contact Playvox for a custom quote
Playvox workforce management is an omnichannel, cloud-based tool by NICE, an AI-focused customer experience software company. This WFM solution harnesses the power of AI to automate contact center tasks and improve employee satisfaction while increasing the accuracy and effectiveness of workforce management.
This solution includes patented AI forecast technology, machine-learning-generated schedules, automated workflows, and an intuitive interface to simplify and streamline contact centerworkforce management. Playvox WFM also integrates with many commonly used tools like Slack, Zendesk, and Freshdesk.
Key features:
- Automated scheduling
- Real-time monitoring and forecasting
- Communication management
- Simple shift swapping
- Workforce training & motivational tools
Contact Centers Clicks Better with Whatfix
Successful workforce management for contact center depends on robust support for both call center agents and customers. Agents need the right tools, knowledge, and training to provide effective customer support. Whatfix helps companies provide this support to agents, and provide additional, easy-to-use support channels for customers, Creating seamless interactions and enhancing satisfaction for all parties involved.
The Whatfix digital adoption platform sits on top of your existing applications to provide agents with contextual guidance and moment-of-need support as they handle customer inquiries. Onboarding tools allow managers to personalized new-agent training to quickly prepare them for their new roles, and self-help knowledge bases facilitate issue resolution before escalation to reduce customer issues and empower agents to resolve their own.
Learn more about how Whatfix can improve your company’s call center workforce management by requesting a free demo today!
