There are lots of aspects of WFO. You can, however, identify two principal elements:
- Quality management
- Workforce management
Let’s take a look at each in turn:
It takes some serious quality management skills to get teams to perform tasks up to a high-quality standard. Thankfully, there are helpful tools available to assist in areas such as skills training, quality reviews, and performance analytics.
However, it’s not just about giving managers good performance data. It’s also about understanding the needs of your agents and giving them the tools to provide great service to the customer.
A good QM system should be able to analyze the performance of a team and create practices that give optimal results. There has to be enough time given to managers, staff, and any other stakeholders to learn from interactions, using the data that quality management software can produce.
Also, managers need to keep their agents feeling engaged in the process by encouraging them to give their own observations, not just on the agent-customer interaction but on the QM software itself. It may provide useful information for you, too. It’s always good to see things from another perspective. In organizational behavior, there’s nothing worse than trying to bring in a much-needed system in the face of an unhappy workforce.
A customer should be able to expect the same high-quality experience every time they contact a particular business. Delivering this consistency is what workforce management is all about.
A key way to ensure this is through good time management: making sure that agent shifts, time off, and office activities are accounted for. Attendance software is geared toward making this happen.
However, you have to be realistic. It’s a rare, and probably not altogether human, employee who can stick to their schedule 100% to the second. By the same token, targets for customer interaction numbers should allow for a degree of variability depending on the nature of the issue and the tendency of some to talk more than others.
Keep an eye on how staff cope with targets and talk to them about it too. A compliance recording practice is important, but having unrealistic goals will not do anything to increase employee productivity or improve customer experience.
How do you go about arriving at the correct schedules in the first place? Most of it is forecasting. Anyone who creates rotas for staff will know that it takes an element of looking ahead to do it well.
So, forecasting is a huge part of effective employee scheduling. You need to look at upcoming demand to properly budget for the correct staff levels. This is likely to be based on previous performance. WM software will look at this, as well as factoring in other elements such as upcoming public holidays and staff absences.
Finally, use your WFM software to keep reassessing staffing levels and schedules. Needs do change over time, after all. The same with your goals—reset them from time to time (at least quarterly) as it becomes apparent that a refresh is needed.
Before we move on, let’s just summarize the two main elements of WFO:
