In a dynamic business landscape, delivering outstanding Customer Experience (CX) has never been more challenging.
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What does WFM mean?
WFM, standing for Workforce Management, refers to the strategic allocation of personnel and resources within a contact center. In a nutshell, WFM helps ensure that your contact center has the right agents, with the right skill sets, at the right time.
This strategic allocation and optimization of your workforce is a critical for delivering personalized customer experiences and achieving contact center efficiency. To achieve this, your WFM system must be well-crafted to ensure that you’re meeting your SLAs, while still developing the best talent. That’s where a Workforce Management solution comes in.
How to use a Workforce Management solution
Contact center efficiency relies on several factors: How many agent do you require? Are there certain SLAs that need to be met? Is there an expected upcoming peak in demand? What would you do in the event of a system failure?
Accurately forecasting demand and scheduling agents to meet it is critical for the success of your contact center. Schedule too few agents for the volume of customer contacts and you risk negatively impacting CX or failing to meet SLAs. Schedule too many, you drive up labor costs.
Using a WFM solution alleviates these concerns. A WFM solution means you can:
Accurately forecast future contact volumes by analyzing historical data.
Appropriately schedule staff to meet demand, design shift patterns and assign agents based on time, skill set, and demand.
Reactively schedule agents on a day-to-day basis, allowing contact centers to maintain their SLA’s and meet customer expectations.
Restore order to the contact center through intra-day management capability. Should an unanticipated issue occur, customer demand peak, or unexplained absenteeism arise, the scalability and flexibility afforded by WFM allows for effective resource planning.
Account for the ‘What-if’ Scenarios via a Disaster Recovery (DR) or a Business Continuity Plan (BCP). WFM can generate forecasts based on what-if scenarios, allowing contact centers to plan and schedule for the future. This ensures that should these scenarios occur, your contact center can quickly plug the gaps.
Time Keep. WFM solutions can capture data at the source and automatically apply rules to ensure accurate and efficient time tracking. This is useful for payroll or overtime calculations.
The Benefits of WFM
WFM has long been recognized as an absolute must-have for contact centers seeking to develop their workforce, improve agent experience, and optimize efficiency. By using WFM to create the best possible fit between forecasted demand and the number of agents scheduled, your business can drive new levels of efficiency:
Improved customer experience and satisfaction.
Reduced labor costs.
Improved agent experience resulting in lower agent churn.
Improved first-contact resolution, resulting in improved CX.
These benefits highlight the importance of human agents. After all, without staff to run the business, it wouldn’t exist. That’s why it’s so important to devote time and attention to employee experience. After all, there’s a positive correlation between employee experience and customer satisfaction.
The ultimate objective of any WFM solution is to optimize productivity and reduce risk. And when a WFM solution is part of a broader, cutting-edge solution, it can help businesses improve employee relations, enhance customer service, and boost your bottom line.
Choosing your WFM software
When choosing the best WFM software for your contact center, you need to take a strategic, practical approach.
Workforce Management can be done manually, or automated intelligently. While 40% of companies currently use excel to manually complete their workforce management, this methodology is labor-intensive and unsustainable. Automating Workforce Management can generate more value, deliver on SLAs with greater efficiency, and optimize net staffing for improved agent and customer experiences.
When selecting your WFM solution, you should consider that:
The solution must be easy to use, with an intuitive, well-designed interface so that even relative novices can be quickly up-skilled to a proficient usage level.
The solution needs to offer detailed, real-time reporting.
The solution must be scalable to meet peaks in demand and the overall requirements of your business.
The software can integrate AI-enhancing efficiency and customer service, helping your business go the extra mile.
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Implement efficient workforce management with storm® WFM™
Implement efficient workforce planning with storm® WFM from Content Guru. Part of the broader storm cloud CX solution, storm WFM is a browser-based tool that delivers workforce management functionality through a simple, intuitive, no-code interface.
Configurable based on the top priorities of your company, WFM is essential for your contact center operations. Want to learn more about how storm WFM can help enhance your business? Read Content Guru latest blog on Workforce Management to ensure you make an informed decision that ensures success.
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