The goal of any Workforce Management (WFM) team is consistency. From a service level perspective, you want to provide a consistent experience to your customers—each and every time they reach out to the contact centre. Service level standards vary greatly by industry and channel, but the goal should always be to answer inbound contacts in a consistent time frame and to ensure you’re maximising the value of your contact centre staff by forecasting and scheduling the right number of people with the right skills at the right time.

Great scheduling depends on accurate forecasting. And as any meteorologist can attest, predicting the future is no exact science. However, when knowledgeable and experienced people have access to the right forecasting tools, your WFM programme will thrive.

WFM Functionality

In the early days of contact centres, prior to the advent of advanced contact routing solutions,  the job of the WFM team was a bit simpler. Agents would only handle one type of call on any given day, so it was simply a matter of predicting the number of contacts you would receive based on historical data—and scheduling agents accordingly.

Today WFM is much more complex. Agents generally have multiple skills and in many cases are responsible for handing contacts from multiple channels—sometimes simultaneously. This makes the job of the WFM Scheduler much more complicated, requiring a deep level of understanding of the impact that this degree of multi-skilling has on the contact centre as a whole.

When looking at any WFM technology, there are a few key requirements that every organisation should be looking for:

The business world has been buzzing about Big Data for decades now. The contact centre is the classic example of a Big Data problem: Recorded phone calls, emails, chats, social media posts, customer comments, CRM, ERP, HRMS, and many other sources of data are coming together in one place; how do you make sense of all of this data? As more organisations have begun working to answer this question, Reporting and Business Intelligence have become a major focus for the contact centre.

The great news is that, in recent years, new Business Intelligence tools have become dramatically more accessible, more cost-effective and more intuitive—allowing just about anyone in the organisation to slice and dice their data into a useful and meaningful format with just a few button clicks. These new tools empower next-generation contact centres and other organisations to be able to use their data to tell the stories and communicate the most critical information they have to the organisation and an easy-to-understand way using concise reporting and clear visualisations.

Reporting Functionality

Flexibility: Every organisation’s reporting requirements are as unique as those organisations themselves. This makes flexibility and customization the most critical qualities in any contact centre reporting platform.

Data integration: As the contact centre becomes the hub for an ever-expanding set of data streams, you need the ability integrate these data sources and create blended data reporting and visualisations that removes data from traditional silos.

Automation: Data collection should be automated so that the latest information is always available to the reporting engine without manual work. The reports and visualisations themselves should also allow for automation so that regular, recurring reports can be delivered to the stakeholders within an organisation with minimal effort.

Enterprise-wide capabilities: Best-in-class reporting and Business Intelligence platforms include true Data Mart functionality that extend their potential to use cases across the entire organisation—not just the contact centre. Seeking out these enterprise-capable solutions increases the value of the tools—and helps the contact centre secure funding for any BI projects, since the cost can be shared between multiple groups in the organisation.

Reporting Best Practises

Determine key stakeholders—but think beyond the contact centre: The first step in building a WFO reporting programme is to determine which departments, teams and work groups your reports will be serving. This list should extend beyond the contact centre—consider every element of your organisation that is impacted by customer experience, from sales and marketing, to supply chain, to top-level leadership.

Gather reporting requirements—but don’t limit yourself to common or existing metrics: Once you have your stakeholders, begin determining your reporting requirements by figuring out what questions you’re attempting to answer and which business problems you’re attempting to solve. While it may not be possible to develop a metric that meets every need on this list, it’s important to start with what you want to know—rather than what metrics you already know exist.

Avoid redundancy—and ensure consistent formulas: Traditionally, many contact centres have taken an ad hoc approach to reporting. An individual user comes with a specific reporting request or need, and a unique report is developed based on that need. But many of these one-off reporting requests end up using the same data and providing overlapping metrics. In practise, this is not only hugely inefficient—wasting time re-creating overlapping or entirely redundant reports—but it also expands the risk of competing metrics. When two similar reports are created separately, they may use different formulas or approaches to measuring the same thing. As you can imagine, this can lead to big internal problems, as different departments and different programmes are monitoring—and acting upon—different versions of reality.

Think big—and leverage enterprise-wide data integration: As you draft reporting requirements and develop reports to meet those needs, don’t let traditional data silos limit your thinking. If a marketing leader wants to combine ACD and QM system data with CRM and marketing automation system data, you should expect a best-in-class contact centre reporting platform to be able to tap into those disparate data streams and synthesize a report that gives that cross-enterprise visibility.

When implementing a new WFO platform, choosing the deployment method that works best for your organisation is almost as important as the platform itself. Organisations of all types are increasingly choosing cloud-based deployments of all their major enterprise systems. Cloud-based WFO offers a wide range of advantages (discussed below), but it’s not right for every organisation. Fortunately, best-in-class WFO platforms give you the freedom and flexibility to choose your deployment model—without sacrificing functionality, scalability or cost-effectiveness. It’s important to begin by reviewing the pluses and minuses of each deployment method to identify which model fits your contact centre’s unique needs and requirements:

On-Premise Deployment

Until recently, the on-premises deployment model was the only option available for companies looking to implement a WFO suite—and it’s still the model most organisations are familiar with. In an on-premise deployment, the organisations supplies its own hardware to support the software platform and all of the infrastructure surrounding it. While software maintenance contracts are common in the WFO industry, the customer is responsible for any hardware-related issues and the expenses associated with supporting that hardware. The primary benefit to an on-premise deployment is that the organisation retains complete freedom to secure the software environment in the way that they see fit—making the on-premises model very appealing for organisations that have extremely specific security requirements.

Cloud Deployment

In the early days of cloud deployments, there were understandable concerns regarding security, as well as frequent functionality limitations (in short, many cloud deployments were basically “lite” versions of the software). However, cloud technology has dramatically improved, and today’s leading cloud-based software offers security and functionality that is equal—and often better—than on-premises versions. Many forward-thinking organisations, including some of the most high-assurance, security-minded companies in the world, now embrace the inherent stability and security of cloud-based solutions. In addition to stability and security, a major benefit of cloud-based deployment is that all maintenance and hardware costs are covered by the vendor rather than the client. This allows the organisation to focus more on their core mission, and less on infrastructure requirements. Automated updates, including new and enhanced functionality and security patches, are another key benefit to moving to the cloud—and particularly beneficial in the WFO space, where the pace of change and technology improvement continues to accelerate. Finally, cloud-based deployments typically provide greater scalability—both up and down—allowing organisations to avoid major capital outlays, only pay for what they need, and be able to quickly ramp up to respond to seasonal spikes or other volume increases.

Hybrid Deployment

In a hybrid deployment, the organisation retains some portion of the software infrastructure on-premise, with other core technology in the cloud. This can be a good middle ground for organisations that have specific security requirements, allowing them to, for example, maintain full, on-premises control of data storage, while shifting the burden of supporting the rest of the WFO suite infrastructure into the cloud and onto the vendor.