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The Back-Office is Waking Up the WFM Market
It’s the year of staff empowerment and engagement. WFM solutions have capabilities that empower its users, and potentially engage them, as well. WFM empowers employees by inviting them to actively participate in the scheduling process, which positions them to manage their work/life balance. It engages employees by giving them performance data that they can use to motivate the “right” behaviors and results.
Innovation in the WFM Market
The new generation of WFM solutions can give contact center, back-office and branch employees unprecedented visibility and input into their work schedules; to the extent permitted by their company, employees can view and have a say in their availability, scheduling preferences and time-off management. The emergence of automated rules-based processes and workflows has expanded the options available to workers, offering a range of choices that was next-to-impossible to manage on a manual basis. Web-based staff self-service portals now provide workers with personal statistics on key performance indicators (KPIs), and show alerts and notifications to help them proactively keep their performance on track. WFM solutions help managers improve staff productivity, satisfaction and retention, while at the same time improving quality and reducing the cost of service. These WFM benefits correlate directly with the top 3 servicing trends for this year, identified by a DMG survey in January 2015: delivering an outstanding customer experience, improving productivity, and reducing the cost of service. (See: Top Enterprise Servicing Goals for 2015)
Workforce Management Finds a Better Direction
2015 is expected to be an exciting year for contact center and back-office WFM solutions. After over three decades of slow adoption and even slower innovation, this essential IT sector is finally attracting companies’ interest and investment dollars, which is driving a desperately needed round of research and development (R&D) and product innovation. What makes this wave of R&D investments interesting is that much of it is coming from emerging competitors or is being targeted at the developing back-office WFM sector.
The Omni-Channel WFM Challenge
When back-office work is added to the mix of interactions handled by a contact center, the challenge grows. Back-office work has different mathematical characteristics from phone calls. Back-office work is often deferred, and therefore has a backlog. A back-office work item typically involves a number of tasks or components, and an employee is likely to work on multiple items (or have several items open) at the same time. The service level for back-office work is also different. Each task in a work item can have its own service level, which may be longer than one year in duration. Erlang was designed for short-duration phone calls that arrive continuously, without backlog or disruption. Therefore, the WFM solutions that apply erlang to emails or other types of non-phone activities are not effective. And, despite vendor claims to the contrary, some form of automation is not necessarily better than none.
What’s Next for WFM
End users want better and more accurate WFM solutions for their contact centers. Since there are more offerings available than at any time in the history of this market, companies are rightfully asking for better solutions with vastly improved user interfaces, and prospects no longer feel tied to their incumbent vendors. Although most of the large contact centers have already been penetrated with a WFM solution, these solutions are not as “sticky” as they were in the past.
DMG estimates that the number of back-office/branch employees is 2.6 times larger than the number of contact center agents. Increasingly, companies are starting to consider the use of WFM in their back-office operating groups, and many are already using WFM to forecast and schedule for branches and retail outlets. The potential to expand sales to a larger audience is appealing to the WFM contact center market leaders, but it has also attracted vendors from many geographies, as well as new competitors. Prospects of all sizes are encouraged to push vendors to deliver feature-rich and flexible WFM solutions that allow them to do what they want and need for their company, instead of being limited by the capabilities of the existing solutions.
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The Customer Journey Really Matters
Ask the Experts
Question:
I run a small contact center with 22 agents. I’d like to use WFM but am wondering if it will deliver benefits to my organization. Can you tell me what benefits I should expect and also what I should be concerned about?
Answer:
Workforce management (WFM) solutions provide benefits to contact centers of various sizes. While small contact centers with fewer than approximately 50 agents will not realize as many productivity improvements, due to the inherent limitations of the erlang C algorithm used in many WFM applications, these solutions offer a variety of other benefits to operations of any size… Read More
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DMG Consulting LLC is a leading independent research, advisory and consulting firm specializing in unified communications, contact centers, back-office and real-time analytics. Learn more at www.dmgconsult.com.