Introduction
Managing employees properly — getting the right people in the right seats at the right times — is key to meeting your business goals. For planners, forecasters, managers and supervisors, this is one of their main concerns, and a primary way they can impact your company’s bottom line.
On top of that, a great employee experience has never been more important. Top potential employees are looking for a positive environment when they compare future employers. And without strong employee engagement, your best employees might not stick around. On top of that, happier employees are more productive employees and tend to provide better customer service — meaning employee experience impacts your bottom line in more ways than one.
So how does a contact center better manage its human resources while improving its employee experience? How do you make your teams happier, more productive and efficient, and improve your business overall? One powerful tool in your arsenal is workforce management software.
Let’s learn about the basics, key features of workforce management (WFM) software, the benefits of implementing WFM software and how to choose the right software option for your contact center.
Basics
First, let’s define what WFM software is, what it does and how it’s changed over time.
Workforce management software helps manage and improve workforce engagement and productivity. It does this by helping decision makers to plan and manage employees in a number of different ways — forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, real-time schedule adherence, capacity planning and more. WFM software helps organizations align business goals with employee flexibility to provide work-life balance and enhance the employee experience.
There are a few reasons why workforce management software’s ability to put the right people in the right seats is important:
Initial workforce management tools were manual in nature, requiring lots of human input to be useful. Digital tools were more efficient than pen and paper, as well as more accessible, but true leaps in productivity have come through automation. Artificial intelligence (AI) in particular has caused major changes, drastically increasing the amount of data that can be processed and analyzed while improving accuracy by minimizing or removing human error from the equation. Today’s WFM software can do more, and can do it faster and better than ever before.
Exploring
What are the pieces that make advanced workforce management solutions what they are? Here are the must-have features to look for in today’s WFM software and why they make workforce management so much easier than in the past.
Your WFM capabilities are only as good as your data. The faster you can obtain data and the more complete and comprehensive that data is, the more reliable your strategic decision-making can be. AI-driven WFM software can gather and sort data in real time, meaning managers and employees alike can quickly react to issues. The vast volume of available data provides a solid foundation for strategic decisions within the contact center.
Workforce forecasting can be managed in part by AI, based first on the volume of interactions and average handle time, then employee skills, business needs and employee needs. Like your strategic decision-making, forecasting can only be as good as the data that is used as input — as well as the technology and the models used. AI drives a more accurate forecast, making it easier to get the right numbers in the right places at the right times.
Those forecasts then can be used to create optimized schedules without needing much, if any, human intervention. Automation helps make creating schedules simpler and faster. Automation doesn’t just free up supervisors’ time for more hands-on management, it can even create better schedules by ensuring all the relevant variables are taken into account every time.
This is one of the more critical tools that workforce management software provides managers. It helps agents track what they’re doing and when, allowing managers to manage schedule adherence in real time. It also allows for time-off management by helping with capacity planning, so you know how many employees will be unavailable at a given time and whether workloads are sustainable with the numbers you have available.
Implementing
Let’s look at some of the benefits of implementing workforce management software, how WFM software allows planners to see across the business while limiting manual work, and how that can impact the bottom line to see why WFM software is so important to your business.
Often the cause of siloed operations is a lack of information or information sharing. A single workforce management solution eliminates this, ensuring data integrity across the organization by consolidating to a single data source — meaning no more data loss or duplication.
Planners can plan more accurately without having to manually enter data into spreadsheets to get the visibility they need. Operations can see the latest data for real-time intraday monitoring to make decisions to optimize against KPIs like service levels. Schedulers benefit from having the latest and greatest forecast data to provide the right flexibility for agents and the business while ensuring the appropriate staffing to cover service levels.
All of this is amplified by using a native WFM software that’s built into the overall contact center software suite, rather than a bolt-on solution that comes separately. Cleaner data means a better output, and eliminating data syncs means you’re operating with the best available data at all times.
A good workforce management solution doesn’t just make life easier for the strategic minds in an organization. It also improves quality of life for the individual employee. WFM software puts more control in CX agents’ hands, allowing them to be masters of their own improvement and scheduling, to an extent. That increased agency boosts morale, increasing overall employee satisfaction and helping you to keep your best employees and lower turnover.
There’s a cascade effect of benefits throughout your contact center when workforce management software is doing its job. When planners have better tools and experiences, they’re more efficient and effective — producing better forecasts, which lead to better schedules that adapt to the needs of the business, agent and customer all at the same time. This empowers supervisors and agents alike with the clarity and flexibility they need, in turn allowing agents to enjoy a better work-life balance while still getting more work done than before. Finally, this all results in a better customer experience, and therefore better outcomes for the business.
The employee satisfaction angle matters for two reasons. First, hiring a new employee is generally going to be more expensive than retaining an existing one. In both money and resources like time, it’s better to keep the team you have — and improve through training and growth — than to continually be forced to hire by high turnover. Second, a happy employee is a more productive employee. Making sure your employees feel invested in their work and their job leads to boosts in the quality of their work, meaning employee satisfaction directly impacts your bottom line.
Genesys has worked with a number of businesses to improve their WFM solutions. Here’s what that looks like, and how it’s helped each business see greater success.
Fanatics, a sports apparel and collectibles company, employs over 1,000 “athletes,” or contact center agents, worldwide. A switch to a cloud-based workforce management solution helped to reduce onboarding times by two days per athlete, while built-in learning maximizes IT training time and budget.
Fanatics is also taking full advantage of the automation and AI-powered capabilities with weekly updates and the ability for athletes to make work/life decisions from home rather than having to request time off or a shift change via email. Also, usage spikes are easier to catch — and can be automatically resourced to ensure sports fans have the support they need, when they need it.
AdaptHealth, a full-service medical equipment company, employs 4,500 agents across the 47 states they serve, but consistency in service quality became harder to manage as the business grew. Key tasks, like ensuring correct staffing levels, relied heavily on manual processes and people pulling data buried in spreadsheets. They lacked the information availability to be able to make smart strategic decisions, in staffing and elsewhere.
After implementing Genesys workforce management, AdaptHealth was quickly able to improve on these issues. Forecasting and scheduling times quickly decreased and both are now largely automated, saving significant time. Greater resource planning accuracy helped lower call abandon rates by 84% over the first year. Managers make decisions based on insights using data they didn’t have access to before, such as real-time occupancy rates, sentiment analysis, call transcriptions and topic spotting. This means not only better scheduling decisions, but also easier and more directed agent coaching and training that helps take agents to the next level in their careers.
Optimizing
As you’ve seen, a WFM solution can do a lot of good for your customer service and experience teams as well as your business as a whole. If you’re not getting all the benefits of workforce management, it’s time to evolve your current solution. Here’s what you should be looking for as you compare your software and vendor options.
As workforce management software needs to play nicely with workforce engagement management (WEM) software, here are some other features that any good WFM software should be able to integrate with. As we mentioned when talking about siloed data, any issues here can be solved by using WFM and WEM software that’s native to your contact center software solution.
AI conversational intelligence
Automatically analyze every interaction with sentiment analysis, agent empathy analysis, topic trends and full call summarization and insights. Use this data to improve conversion rates; enhance bots and virtual agents; and reduce handle time and interaction volume.
Conversational intelligence helps agents improve skills, which helps to refine staffing because supervisors and the WFM system have better views into who’s most knowledgeable to handle certain inquiries.
Provide agents and supervisors alike with AI assistance that improves both efficiency and quality of customer interactions. Automate manual tasks; surface context and intent to guide interactions; and leverage translation to support multilingual teams.
Copilots ease staffing burdens by making each task easier for the individual agent, allowing them to get more work done in less time with less effort. A copilot doesn’t replace an agent, but it does make understaffing less of an issue by increasing efficiency.
Quality assurance and compliance
Use interaction data to improve performance metrics like first-call resolution. Record interactions across channels. AI delivers Voice of the Customer (VoC) insights, identifies performance patterns and automates accurate evaluations to reduce bias.
Better QA procedures allow supervisors to help their agents to improve in their most important growth areas, meaning they become more efficient as well as more able to fill more roles, making appropriate staffing easier and more flexible. They also allow supervisors to schedule training for times that don’t affect agents’ work availability, meaning that training doesn’t have to be a nuisance.
Employee performance and management
Improve performance and reduce employee turnover with personalized recognition. Use AI to pinpoint each agent’s specific knowledge and skill gaps, and use gamification to motivate agents with scorecards, leaderboards and contests.
Employee performance can help ensure schedule adherence and punctuality with agents by gamifying those metrics, providing them greater incentives to succeed — and therefore greater likelihood that they will.
From a central hub, aggregate real-time data to monitor the health and efficiency of your contact center. Easily customize your view with data from interactions, agent performance and journey insights for continuous optimization. Having your WFM software solution as a part of a holistic contact center software platform makes it far easier to connect the dots and gain knowledge across the business.
Mobile app
An integration with a mobile app that allows agents to manage their schedules when, where and how they need to is increasingly important. It provides them with another avenue to improve work-life balance, not only by giving them greater control over scheduling, but by allowing them to do so while away from their computer, at their own convenience.
First, and most simply, make sure that the vendor provides the capabilities your business needs to succeed. If they offer an outdated product without AI capabilities or cloud hosting, you can safely eliminate that vendor from the running.
Think about how your business is evolving with AI, not only within the WFM space but throughout the business. Virtual agents are taking on more and more interactions, agent and supervisor copilots are reducing manual work, and none of this is going anywhere. How can each vendor you look at help you to rethink and evolve your WFM capabilities and practices along with these changes so you can not only keep up, but lead?
Evaluate the vendor’s support options before, during and after the sale. WFM software can be complicated to fully implement and integrate into your business, at least at first. A strong customer success organization can help to make sure this happens, and deal with any issues that might come up. It’s practically a necessity if you want to be sure you get the most out of your software.
Part of this is the software demo and trial. A demo should at least provide the option of being vendor-led, and support through the trial is important as you’ll likely want some guidance as you go. Make sure the trial doesn’t drastically curtail access to the software — you need to see what it’s really going to be like in action in order to make an educated decision.
Conclusion
Workforce management software drives business impact. It improves operational efficiency, forecast accuracy, staffing alignment and cost control — supporting better decisions, streamlining planning and enabling easier scalability.
Implementing workforce management software puts the right people in the right seats at the right times, and allows your business to cover any staffing contingency with ease. It improves the employee and customer experience, but most importantly it impacts your bottom line.
If you’re not using cutting-edge WFM software today, consider implementing it to get all these benefits and more — and if your current vendor isn’t getting you all you need, perhaps it’s time for a change.
Frequently asked questions
WFM and WEM are closely related. Workforce management is personnel management and administration — basically, making sure the right person is in the right seat at the right time. It focuses on things like scheduling and attendance.
WEM is the full comprehensive strategy across resource management, performance and career development, and quality and compliance. Workforce engagement management builds a more positive work environment, making people feel happier and more invested in their work. It’s all about employee welfare, as well as resource management. WFM is a part of a comprehensive WEM strategy and solution.
It’s hard to pin a specific number or percentage on the ROI of WFM software, because every business situation is a little different — as are the specific software options. That said, there are KPIs that you can target. Accuracy, adherence, service levels, occupancy and agent utilization are all important to track — all should improve, and all have deep impact on your bottom line.
Most importantly, time and resources devoted to administration are reduced because less is being done manually and more is automated. Also, the fewer systems and tools required for WFM streamline processes and save time and effort. More accurate forecasts also reduce overtime costs, as the right people at the right times mean you’ll need less overtime.
Another way WFM software reduces your operational costs is by reducing turnover. The process of hiring and onboarding a new employee is demanding and costly, both in terms of real dollars and time, effort and resources. It’s better and cheaper to keep — and improve — the employees you already have. Creating a more flexible employee experience with WFM software helps to keep employees happy and minimize agent attrition, and the analytics available provide the ability to coach in better, more targeted ways that help the employees you have today to grow.
Yes, workforce management software can integrate with other systems. The best option, though, is to choose a contact center software option that natively includes WFM and workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities, so those integrations are unnecessary.
The benefits of WFM software for remote teams are similar to those for in-office teams, only amplified because of the difficulties of managing a remote team. Ensuring proper staffing, managing time off and time tracking, and more are only more difficult when you can’t see the people you’re working with. Workforce management software makes it easy.
Looking to improve your own employee experience? Learn how Genesys Cloud WFM software can boost productivity and increase efficiency while helping you retain and train the talent you have.
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