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Workforce ManagementBeyond the Contact Center

by Bill Durr, Principal Global Solutions ConsultantVerint

®Systems Inc.

If I may paraphrase a great author, no contact center is an island. However, in day-to-dayoperations, contact centers do seem to function like islands. Many of the management processesthat seem so right in today’s centers are perceived as harsh and impractical in nearly every other part of the enterprise.

This poses a real problem. The things we do and the tools we use to manage the contact center produce results—the evidence is clear. But managers of other enterprise areas almost never confer with their colleagues in the contact center or investigate whether some of the contactcenter's tools and processes might help them manage their departments better. Why not?

Contact Centers: A Unique EnvironmentI think the problem lies in the fact that contact centers are unique environments. Their management practices seem harsh because they must address a variety of factors:

Units of work (i.e., a phone call or email interaction) arrive randomly.

The time to complete a single work-unit is relatively short, measured in minutes.

The service-level agreement—the need to answer a large percentage of interactions witha specified number of seconds—is notoriously difficult to achieve consistently.

The concept of backlog is largely absent, except for email.

Unlike other departments in the enterprise, contact centers are heavily focused on employeeschedules. Activities such as start times, breaks, lunches, and so on, are scheduled down to theminute, often using workforce management software to facilitate the task. No wonder it's easy for 

managers of other departments to dismiss the management tactics of the contact center aslargely irrelevant and inappropriate for their groups.

The Seven Questions of Workforce ManagementIn reality, there’s more commonality among the contact center and other areas of the enterprisethan you may realize. The key is to think in terms of work , rather than schedules. Using this frameof reference, managers in contact centers, branch and retail stores, and back-office operationssuch as order processing, billing, and account management all need to respond to the sameseven, fundamental questions:

1. How much work needs to be done?

2. How many labor hours will be required to finish the work within the specified service-level

agreement?

3. What work schedules will help us meet the work demand successfully?

4. Are the work forecasts accurate?

5. Are employees following their schedules?

6. Are we meeting the legal and cultural requirements for our employees?

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 7. What do customers think about the way we do our work?

These questions are universal and cut across functional business lines and departments. Theparticularly critical variables—nature of the work, time to complete a piece of work, and severity of the service delivery goals—relate directly to the need to staff correctly. Higher costs and unhappycustomers are the most obvious outcomes to poor staffing practices, and they can be fatal to abusiness in hypercompetitive times.

Enterprise Workforce ManagementGiven that contact centers, branch offices, and back-office operations are all seeking the answer to the same fundamental set of questions, it makes sense to use workforce managementsoftware to address them. But there’s a caveat here: It’s critical that the workforce managementsolution be reengineered to reflect the requirements of this different environment. Merely addingseats to your existing contact center workforce management software isn’t the right approach.The environments are intrinsically different.

In the back office, work units tend to be longer. Adjudicating a claim or processing an application,for example, typically takes hours, not minutes. Unlike the contact center, work arrives inpredictable bundles, such as in the morning mail delivery, rather than through an ACD. Service-level agreements are typically measured in hours or days, and the concept of backlog is

fundamental.

In addition to providing insight into how much work there is to do, workforce managementsoftware can provide tracking to alert managers when work items are jeopardizing service-levelagreements. With visibility into the specific skills of their employees, managers can identify whereexcess labor capacity exists and redirect it to the appropriate work queues where items are atrisk.

Ultimately, workforce management software can help organizations gain insight into staffing,processes, and productivity across all the areas of their operations that impact customers. Andwhile that newfound visibility won’t change the way contact centers are managed, it almostcertainly will change management practices in the back office substantially.

About the AuthorBill Durr is principal global solutions consultant for Verint Systems. With over 25 years of experience in the contact center industry, he is the author of articles and books on contact center technology and management and speaks frequently on industry-related topics.

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