The 2025 Call Centre Helper survey What Contact Centres are Doing Right Now revealed many valuable insights about the state of play in the contact center industry, especially in the field of workforce management (WFM). One survey question was ‘What is your biggest contact center scheduling problem?’ The responses were fascinating.
That begs the question: How well does the WFM technology of 2025 address these problems? Let’s explore the two biggest challenges and see:
Absence is a fact of life in every business. Absences that are planned are not the problem. Planned absences include approved time off, parental leave, pre-planned training, and meetings. It’s unplanned absences that cause headaches. The most common form of unplanned absence is sick leave taken at short notice. Other types of unplanned absence include family emergencies, transport issues, and agents simply not turning up for work.
Lateness is a sub-category of schedule non-adherence. At first glance, an agent turning up 15 minutes late does not pose as serious a problem as an agent not turning up at all. But lateness always has negative consequences.
A high rate of unplanned absences or lateness can quickly become a problem for efficient contact center scheduling and significantly impact its operations.
As customers, we’ve all heard the announcement “We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment. Please wait to be served by an advisor”. Sometimes this happens because the number of contacts really is higher than forecast. But more often than not, it is because absence and lateness weren’t managed well enough. Result: longer waiting times and frustrated customers.
The adage “Absence makes your friends work harder” is nowhere more relevant than in contact centers. Agents who turn up late or don’t show up at all simply increase the workload for their colleagues. Left unchecked, this leads to stress, burnout, and ultimately increased staff turnover.
If absence and lateness damage the customer experience on an ongoing basis, eventually customer loyalty will be lost. That means:
If agents are routinely burned out as a result of their colleagues’ absences, ironically, they are more likely to call in sick themselves, thus creating a vicious circle.
Well-run contact centers try to mitigate the impact of absence and lateness by measuring and predictingshrinkage: the percentage of agents’ paid time that is spent unproductively. They then inflate the staffing numbers to compensate for agents being absent when the day arrives. To put it bluntly, elevated shrinkage means elevated labor costs, and that damages the bottom line.
The best WFM software helps both proactively and reactively. Reactive intervention is about detecting occurrences of absence and lateness and taking steps to reduce them in the future. Proactive intervention is about creating an environment where absence and lateness are less likely to occur in the first place.
It’s important to have a well-thought-out strategy for managing absence and lateness.
Contact centers have always experienced marked variation in contact volumes and average handling time (AHT) by time of day, day of week, and across the seasons. Anecdotally, the level of volatility has increased in recent years, and this is borne out by the survey results.
This is likely explained by the increased use of customer self-service, automation, and chatbots. These technologies are designed to handle certain categories of customer enquiries and thus relieve the burden on the human agents. Ironically, this has actually made workforce management more difficult.
Chatbots can handle simple, routine enquiries well. But the enquiries that can’t be automated are the more complex ones, which typically have longer and more variable AHT. Planning for a small number of variable tasks is always more challenging than planning for a large volume of homogeneous tasks.
Being unable to handle demand volatility effectively can negatively affect all areas of your business, especially scheduling in contact centers. This is clear from the survey, as 30.8% of organizations cite it as their biggest challenge.
If you’re struggling with managing volatility in your contact center, your customers are more likely to experience an inconsistent service level (SL). If a ‘spike’ of complex enquiries arrives in a short space of time, customers will be kept waiting, and the SL goal will not be met. Conversely, in quiet periods, SL will be above the goal. To cope with spikes, agents may rush their calls, leading to reduced empathy and accuracy, which in turn results in a poorer customer experience.
Agents endure ‘feast and famine’. When volatility is not managed properly, periods of elevated workload and pressure are punctuated by periods of boredom. This can lead to mental fatigue and stress. Agents may worry about being blamed for poor performance if the volatility has a negative impact on performance metrics.
The customer and employee impacts described above can also be damaging to the business. Customer churn and employee churn are undesirable from a human point of view. They are also costly. Staffing up to cope with peaks can result in over-staffing during the quiet intervals, which is also bad for business efficiency.
WFM software has always been about:
Increased volatility makes WFM even more indispensable. It also means that the components of WFM software must be more capable than ever.
Forecasting for a large volume of similar calls is fairly easy; there is ‘safety in numbers’. Forecasting for a relatively small number of contacts with significant AHT variability is much more difficult. Time-series-based forecasting using weighted averages is no longer sufficient. The software must be able to detect trends and patterns in contact volume that don’t follow a simple historical cycle and spot patterns in volume and AHT that aren’t obvious. With modern, AI-powered forecasting, you can create highly accurate daily, weekly, and annual forecasts, ensuring informed decisions and consistent service level performance.
WFM software needs to support more creative scheduling methods that match supply with demand, even with steep peaks and deep valleys. We’ll come back to that in detail in part 2 of this blog, where we address Problem 3: Meeting Service Levels Efficiently. In brief, volatility in contact volume and AHT means that schedule optimization is more important than ever.
Effective intraday (real-time) management can help keep volatility under control. The best WFM software automatically recalculates forecasts and staffing requirements throughout the day as new data arrives. It enables planners to adjust schedules, breaks, and meetings on an informed basis and thus defend KPIs, even when spikes occur.
The evidence is clear: the best WFM software does indeed rise to the contact center scheduling challenges of today. To recap, the two biggest contact center scheduling problems in 2025 are:
If your current WFM software doesn’t handle these problems well, it’s time to challenge your vendor or consider an upgrade. If you’re in the process of selecting new WFM software, it’s a good idea to check how well each system meets these requirements.