Real-time management is perhaps one of the most crucial aspects of workforce management. It is the stage where your employees interact with your customers, and the reputation of your business is directly impacted for better or worse. Yet, it tends to get the least amount of attention when planning a WFM strategy. In this article, you'll learn three top tips to improve real-time adherence in your contact center and help your team stay aligned with operational goals throughout the day.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this article:
The business is very interested to know the forecasted headcount requirement because it impacts the number of people you need to hire and schedule. There is a lot of focus on ensuring that regression analysis and business intelligence produce a forecast that the business is willing to fund, balancing customer and shareholder need. The scheduling process also receives a lot of attention in planning, both for ensuring there are the right number of people to meet the customer accessibility targets and for employee well-being. Having bad schedules can hurt your customers and the employees who are entrusted to provide superior service to your customers.
>> Also interesting: Learn about smarter intraday management with Peopleware
So, why does real-time tend to be more ad-hoc? Well, it’s probably because it’s not really named right. When we say “real-time” what we’re really saying is “responding to the intraday variations to adjust the plan to reality”. So, this is really just the last step in the plan and not a separate activity. The forecasting and scheduling plans can be meticulous, but once you get to the day-of, you can face a number of variations that can impact your ability to deliver efficient service levels, including:
The expectation of any workforce management team is that they’ve planned for these contingencies. The reality is that you can experience one or many of these at the same time. The pace is fast in contact centers and with a lot of moving parts, it’s easy to just throw more resources at the problem, or reskill agents to take other call types (perhaps delivering some ‘spirited’ feedback to the operations team?). Not only is this inefficient, but can cause a lot of employee dissatisfaction. The longer it takes to execute real-time management the longer the queues become and the more time and money it takes to recover the service level.
Best practice is to have a simple one-page document that all team leaders and workforce management analysts keep at their desks. This document should show the actions to take when service levels are above or below goal by a certain amount.
For example: if service levels fall 5 points below plan, non-critical offline activities are canceled or rescheduled. Conversely, the plan should also define what actions take place when service levels are above plan. Remember, it’s not just about hitting the service level, it’s about tightly aligning staff to actual demand.
A good element of this plan is to outline when and how agents get reskilled from one call type to another. Getting this alignment right in advance makes the intraday management process smoother and more efficient.
As you begin to see what is actually happening during the day, this is your opportunity to draw conclusions from the data and project what is likely to happen for the rest of the day. Once you’ve done this reforecast, take action on staffing accordingly. For example, this allows you to adjust 5 pm staffing at 1 pm, rather than waiting until “real-time” to make changes.
The biggest challenge in reforecasting is determining whether what you’re seeing is a temporary spike or a genuine trend. Engage the operations team, check call reason data, and leverage any business intelligence available to inform your decisions.
If you’re unsure, it can be helpful to adjust the remainder of the day by part of the variance rather than all of it. For instance, if volume is up 15% by 11 am, you might increase staffing for the rest of the day by 7%. This recognizes the increase and allows action to be taken while reducing the risk of overstaffing.
I know this may sound like fingernails on a blackboard to some people, but managing adherence in real time consumes a lot of workforce management and leadership time, and at best it only stops the bleeding. Part of schedule adherence is influenced by call length - for example, 15-minute handle time calls are more likely to push someone out of adherence than 3-minute calls, and this should be factored into the projected adherence target.
The larger issue arises when schedules aren’t followed, which is often behavior-driven. The best way to manage this is through historical reports, preferably next-day, so employees can connect their behaviors during the day with the actual metrics received. This approach equips them to understand how their actions drive adherence. Managing adherence strictly in real time generally causes frustration and doesn’t address the core issue. Conversely, managing at a weekly or monthly level can render the adherence score meaningless, as employees can’t tie their behaviors to the outcomes.
Try incorporating these ideas into your intraday actions. Doing so will not only help you respond more effectively to intraday variances, but also strengthen the relationship between workforce management and operations, a true win/win.