Donna Fluss is the founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, a firm specializing in customer-focused business strategy, operations and technology services for Global 2000 and emerging companies. Ms. Fluss is a recognized thought leader and innovator in CRM, contact center and real-time analytics. For over 25 years, she has helped end users build world-class differentiated contact centers.

It's Time to do WFM Right!

The contact center workforce management (WFM) market is waking up. The recession-driven need to accelerate improvements in contact center efficiency and effectiveness made 2009 a relatively good year for this well-established technology sector. Contact center leaders have had a "love/hate" relationship with WFM solutions for years. Managers buy into the need for WFM, which is why 84.4% of participants in a recent DMG benchmark study indicated that WFM was mission-critical. (See The Winning Staffing Formula.) However, more than 25% of enterprises have chosen not to purchase a third-party/packaged contact center WFM solution because of the applications' cost, complexity, often sub-optimal accuracy and the challenges involved in applying their recommendations.

WFM Market Challenges

WFM vendors have been hearing complaints from their contact center customers for years, but they have not done enough to address their concerns. This is not because they don't care what their customers and prospects have to say. Many of the vendors are well aware of the challenges that customers face in trying to use and implement their solutions. The problem is that prior to 2008, the revenue generated from WFM solutions was so modest that it limited vendor research and development (R&D) budgets. (R&D budgets are generally based on a percentage of annual revenue.)

This situation started to improve in 2008 for two primary reasons. First, workforce optimization (WFO) vendors who had purchased stand-alone workforce management solutions to integrate into their suites started to make both R&D and marketing investments. Also, a larger number of contact centers started to purchase WFM solutions. The WFM solutions are moving in the right direction, but the market still has a few major obstacles to overcome. To reach their full potential, WFM solutions must address these three major challenges:

1. System inaccuracy costs users major dollars
2. WFM solutions are too hard to use
3. WFM solutions are not doing a good job meeting the needs of multi-channel contact centers

WFM Delivers Value

Despite these known challenges, there is proven value in using a WFM solution. Any single-site contact center with more than 100 agents would benefit from WFM, as would any complex multi-channel/multi-site environment with more than 50 agents. The importance and benefits of using WFM increase with agent headcount and site complexity. Even if WFM forecasts are not optimal, it would be far more challenging for contact centers to forecast their transaction volumes, and create and assign schedules without an automated solution.

During the past few years, WFM vendors have introduced innovations such as agent self-service modules to improve supervisor efficiency and empower agents to have more control over their schedules. While self-service modules do not fix the underlying problems in WFM solutions, they have proven highly effective in reducing the management burden and increasing agent satisfaction and retention. This also contributes to an improved customer experience - as happy agents communicate their enthusiasm to customers - and reductions in operating costs.

Real-time adherence modules provide another valuable capability: They identify and measure when agents are or are not where they are supposed to be. While there are right and wrong ways to handle agent adherence issues, these modules are necessary for identifying and minimizing shrinkage in agent availability.

A third important module and function is intra-day management. These modules allow managers to re-forecast staffing requirements during the day as needed. Intra-day management is a great concept, but many WFM applications need enhancements to this feature, as reflected in DMG’s benchmark study.

The Future for Contact Center WFM Solutions

Enterprises want to enhance their workforce management practices but need help from the vendors to effect change. The market needs better forecasting tools and applications that are easier to implement and use. In addition, contact center managers need to rethink how they apply WFM and deploy it more consistently and fairly.

To learn more about the contact center WFM market and the functional capabilities of leading and contending competitors, see DMG’s 2010 Workforce Management Report.

The Winning Staffing Formula - A Benchmark Study of Contact Center Workforce Management

Presented By: Donna Fluss, President DMG Consulting LLC
Date: Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Time: 1:00 - 2:00 pm (EST)

During this webinar DMG Consulting will share the results of a worldwide benchmark study on contact center WFM. DMG Consulting and InVision Software will provide technology and operational best practices that will help you optimize the benefits of your WFM solution today and into the future. This webinar will address many topics, including:

• The top WFM forecasting and scheduling challenges and how to address them
• Channels currently supported by WFM and what is planned for 2014
• The changing role and benefits of WFM solutions for contact centers and the enterprise
• The growing impact of social media on contact centers

Register Now

The Secret to a Good Night’s Sleep? Contact Center Strategic Planning

Presented By:Ric Kosiba, President Bay Bridge Decision Technologies and Donna Fluss, President DMG Consulting LLC
Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Time: 2:00 - 3:00 pm (EST)

We’ve all been there. Staring at the ceiling at 4am replaying the day’s events in our contact center. Questioning every step. The fact is, you, your planners, and your teams did everything right. The problem’s not with you or them, but rather the out-dated technologies you are forced to use to complete your strategic plans. In this session, DMG and Bay Bridge Decision Technologies discuss:

• The difference between WFM and strategic planning
• Challenges in using WFM for strategic planning
• Trends driving the adoption of Contact Center Strategic Planning
• Characteristics of Contact Centers that will benefit most from Strategic Planning and how to get started

Register Now

Best Practices for an Effective WFM Strategy: Getting the Most from your Workforce Management Investment

Date: Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Time: 1:00 - 2:00 pm (EST)

Join this webinar sponsored by GMT Corporation and hosted by Donna Fluss, President of DMG Consulting, LLC, to learn the top do’s and don’ts of contact center workforce management. During this session, you’ll learn best practices for:

• Using workforce management to reduce operational costs and improve sales and service
• Finding the optimal balance between contact center requirements and agent needs
• Empowering agents with a work/life balance
• Enabling agents to control their professional schedules
• Making it easier for agents to make schedule changes and request overtime and time off

Register Now

The Winning Staffing Formula A Benchmark Study of Contact Center Workforce Management

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) Guide for Contact Center Managers

Contact Center Coaching Best Practices: Outstanding Agents Strengthen Your Brand

2010 Contact Center Workforce Management Market Report

Question:

Would it be too wrong and what would be the extent of the error to treat emails like calls in an erlangC calculation in the long term personnel planning of a contact center blending inbound calls and emails/fax? (SLA calls 60/30; SLA mail 12 hrs; volume of mail is about 20-25% of total contacts.) Can we use the same service level parameter for the email portion as for the calls?

Answer:

Erlang or a modified form of erlang is the primary algorithm used in WFM solutions to forecast calls for contact centers, even though it was not designed for this purpose. It was intended to be used for calls of very short duration, such as directory assistance. Erlang’s many weaknesses result in forecasts that are not always accurate, generally over-forecasting staffing needs. While erlang is not the ideal mathematical equation to apply to forecasting phone calls, it is even less suited to emails.

There are many quantifiable reasons not to use erlang to forecast email volume. Most significant is its inability to handle variability in arrival rates, which is characteristic of emails.

The reality, though, is that many WFM solutions use a modified form of erlang to calculate email volumes because they have not come up with a better forecasting method for this channel. While I have not done a mathematical analysis, I believe that using a modified version of erlang to forecast email volume is better than having no automation at all.

Most organizations apply different service levels for emails and calls. The primary reason for this is that it's not necessary to respond to emails as quickly as phone calls. In general - and there may be exceptions - customers don’t expect emails to be responded to on a real-time basis, unlike calls. Think about it this way: If a customer will be happy to receive a response to their email within 2 hours, why invest additional resources to provide quicker service? There is a tremendous amount of complexity in WFM, which only grows as additional channels are added to contact centers.

For additional information, see Building a Multi-Channel Contact Center in the Era of Social Networking.

Have a question for the DMG Experts? Ask Us!