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Fifteen years ago, Bill Gates opined that business was racing toward the "speed of thought," and he wasn’t alone in his predictions of a faster future. Top selling business books of that period included Blur: the speed of change in the connected economy and Competing on Internet Time and Real Time: preparing for the age of the never satisfied customer. Life became a little more complicated for managers of call and contact centers as they looked for new tools to adjust to the onslaught of changing customer expectations. Yesterday’s prognostications have been our reality now for many years. Today's customer seeks convenience and will pick up the phone, or click on your web page at any time of the day or night and from anywhere in the world. Self-service systems such as voice recognition readily deal with simpler customer inquiries. But when a customer makes the effort to connect to a warm-blooded person, today’s contact center manager has to make certain that a skilled agent is there to answer the question, take the order, create a positive experience. If a skilled agent isn't there when your customer comes knocking, you've lost an opportunity. Raising your customer retention just five percentage points can increase the value of your average customer by 25 to 100 percent. Conversely, it costs three to six times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. When we look to the workforce to find agents who can represent the company effectively, what do we find? Bright capable people are available. Like your customers, however, your agents have busy lives and they seek convenience. More than ever before, your employees are likely to be students, single parents, or retirees. Today's workforce is dynamic and flexible. Employees and employers are not limited to yesterday’s three standard varieties: day shift, night shift, swing shift. Yesterday’s tools gave some assistance to call center managers tasked with accurately forecasting phone calls and scheduling the right agents at the right times to answer those calls. Automated workforce management systems, developed in the past 10 to 20 years, have proven helpful enough that an estimated 10% of call centers have elected to use them. Some basics endure In a business that is customer driven, scheduling the right number of agents with the proper skills to handle all calls promptly has been proven to enhance customer satisfaction, promote repeat business and thus increase profits. The business benefits of accurate scheduling are not trivial to any company with a customer focus. Obviously, understaffing causes poor customer service. Not so obvious is the way understaffing can have a snowball effect that drags service down ever lower. Agents who are overwhelmed by long queues of waiting customers and pressed to complete calls quickly tend to rush through calls in a way that leaves transactions incomplete and generates additional calls. If the overload continues, burnout sets in and call handling times actually increase. Customers who feel they have been waiting too long to speak to someone tend to talk longer when they do get through, even if it is only to complain about the wait. Longer call times then create longer queues and more stress for the agents in a vicious circle of overload and delay. The result may be an out-of control condition where the goal of responding promptly to every customer is abandoned as unrealistic and the customer is left listening to a recorded announcement: “Your call is important to us. Please wait for the next available agent.” Forecasting call volume accurately is the first step in avoiding the snowball effect. Another step is creating a schedule flexible enough to match work hours, lunches, breaks, meetings, with the peaks and valleys of customer demand. Adjusting Workforce to Call Flow In most businesses, call volumes vary widely from day to day and hour to hour. For example, companies in some industries receive twice as many calls on Monday as on Friday. During a typical business day, call volumes build up rapidly at certain hours of the day and fall off sharply between these peak hours. The right number of agents for 9:30 AM Monday morning is not the same as the right number of agents for 12:30 PM Thursday afternoon. Having enough agents on average to handle the average number of customer calls may mask an environment that cycles between overload and wasteful idleness. The challenge is to find a way of matching agent schedules to the demands of the business on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, even minute-to-minute basis to assure contact center efficiency. Given some flexibility in employee work hours, and perhaps a modest number of part timers or temps, it is possible to achieve a good match of staff schedules to the needs of the business, even with wide swings in call volume. Applying today’s leading technology makes it feasible to be sure you have the right people at the right time. This can make a very big difference in how cost effectively you meet call center service levels. We know that it is very costly to not answer the door when customers come knocking. Conversely, it is very costly to overstaff when 70% of call center expense is payroll. Helping you control these costs and enhance customer satisfaction with its attendant profitability is what the new generation of workforce management software can do for you. The new generation of workforce management software will adapt easily to your environment. Call centers differ widely in many respects. For example: ? hours of operation ? call handling time and after call work ? performance targets for how quickly calls should be answered and how fast a work pace will be set for agents ? how quickly customers abandon and how soon they try again (if ever) ? technical characteristics of the ACD or switch ? work rules about the length of work tours, breaks, overtime, days off The new generation of workforce management must adapt easily and rapidly to all these attributes. It is no longer possible to invest in expensive long-term research and engineering to set up a call center with the expectation that conditions will then remain essentially stable for a number of years. Instead, we see our clients making daily adjustments to performance targets, the organization of call flow, the hours of sites. In many cases, modern programming technology makes it possible for software to track system data and tune the behavior of the scheduling system without requiring user intervention. This capability must be employed to the maximum extent possible so that management and clerical effort is not wasted on routine monitoring and maintenance. The best of the new technology employs adaptive algorithms that learn the unique characteristics of your call center and use that information to produce ever better schedules. Adaptive algorithms were developed for the new business world where change is a constant. They take into account variances in markets and the ways that demands on the call center increase or decrease or require new skill sets among the agents. The software’s learning abilities take all the variables into account, so it is constantly fine-tuning schedules to match your business needs. With this technology, scheduling software actually learns the patterns of workload and performance at your call center. This technology looks at the typical performance levels that you are achieving and discovers the patterns that are typical of your environment. For example, if your average call handling time goes up substantially at night because you have fewer senior people or a different mix of calls, the algorithms are designed to discover this pattern and take it into account in scheduling. Based on what it has learned, it will schedule enough agents to meet service targets for your unique night time conditions. So instead of being one size fits all, the software recognizes the variables in the real world that impact call center performance. Scalability Besides learning your business, the new generation of workforce management must be able to grow with it. The new generation of software will be highly scalable so that while it will be used at large corporations, it will also be available to startups with call centers employing as few as 10 agents. A scalable system will grow seamlessly as your business grows from startup to Fortune 500. As you expand from one site to multiple sites spread across time zones with thousands of employees, more and more of the software’s features for large scale operations will be available via the Web with a click of your mouse. This eliminates the need to constantly upgrade or change software as your business grows. Easy to use, easy to connect The new work force management software has to be designed for people who have other things to do. Donald Norman has said that “technology becomes invisible when it is successful.” The success of the Internet provides a model for the new generation of workforce management software. The new generation of workforce management cannot be the preserve of a few specialists tending proprietary systems. It has many users and many sources of input. Agents, as well as managers, need to know about schedules. They want the convenience of checking for themselves, without waiting in line to see a list on the bulletin board, or calling a clerk. And they provide input to schedules based in part on agent availability and agent preferences. Workforce management software is no longer a closed system, communicating only with a proprietary ACD system. Instead, workforce management software will integrate workflows from multiple sources, ACDs, e-mail queues, on-line chat, and the data gathered by the workforce management system will be used in many ways beyond just developing and administering schedules. It needs to be accessible on line, in formats that are compatible with desktop applications and other corporate information systems. For all the reasons set forth above, the new generation of workforce management is Web-based and Internet deliverable so the power of the workforce scheduling software is accessible through standard browsers. This type of Service-as-a-Service, or SaaS scheduling, is an open system developed using standard APIs so you can import and export files from desktop applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel. It will employ XML as a standard way of exchanging data with other systems. While some corporations want to install and run the software at their computer centers, the option of Web-hosting allows a company to outsource maintenance and assure that the latest version of the software is available without any need for updating local servers. End users will have the most current software available the minute they access the scheduling program via their browsers. This use of open Web-based technology has a number of advantages including ease of use and scalability. Anyone familiar with a standard Web browser, such as Internet Explorer, will be able to use the workforce management software. It is designed so the complexity of the technology is transparent to the users. A user does not need to know technical details of forecasting and scheduling in order to work with it successfully. Its point-and-click graphical user interface requires very little training so even entry level scheduling clerks can productively use it. This allows you to enhance productivity while reducing headcount. Web accessibility for SaaS scheduling also offers the advantage of enhanced communications with employees, especially those who work night shifts, weekends and other non-traditional schedules. In organizations where personnel policy permits it, employees can check their work schedules from home, which helps curtail absenteeism. And company policy permitting, it also can allow employees to interactively swap hours with other employees or request a day off from a supervisor. Demand-driven Scheduling The new generation of scheduling software will be demand driven.As mentioned above, having enough agents on average to handle the average number of customer calls is not enough; the challenge is to match agent schedules to the demands of the business on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, even minute-to-minute basis. Even a small error in staffing can dramatically affect call center service levels. Every agent above or below the exact number required to meet service targets makes a difference. For example, in a typical call center environment a change of as little as 5% in staff can make the difference between a very poor 7% or 8% answered in 20 seconds and an acceptable target level of 80%. New approaches to programming allow us to schedule at a finer level of detail than ever before. These new programming techniques juggle all the complexities of work rules and employee availabilities to achieve the best possible match between the available workforce and the minute to minute flow of customer demand. There is an obvious economic benefit in being able to schedule workers precisely when you need them. But there is also a benefit to the ability of the employer to attract and retain a quality workforce. The nature of the workforce is changing as people adapt their lifestyles to the nonstop economy. Employees are seeking more flexible hours than the traditional nine-to-five workday allowed. In a tight labor market, companies staffing contact centers can gain a competitive edge by initiating scheduling that goes beyond nine-to-five to make use of the skills of working parents, students and senior citizens who choose not to work a traditional 40-hour week. This can be accomplished using workforce management software capable of setting up work assignments based on customer demand. For example, you might be able to hire a person with a skill set you need, such as the ability to work quickly with instant messaging technology. However, this potential hire may be a college student who must work around a heavy class schedule. The new generation of call center software will be able to match the student’s available hours to the times when instant messaging volume is highest at your contact center. This allows you to accomplish two things. You place a highly skilled person into a schedule to gain maximum productivity. And you have employees who are happy to have a job that dovetails with the other demands in their lives. This will reduce human resources costs associated with job dissatisfaction, such as high turnover, absenteeism and lack of motivation. Conclusion The technology discussed in this article is more than a vision of the future. It is available now in Irene®, the new generation of workforce management software from ISC Consultants. Irene is smart, Internet delivered, and based on open standards. Irene is constantly being enhanced through further innovations that will meet the needs of multimedia contact centers of the future. ISC provides Irene®, the most advanced workforce management software available to contact centers today. Irene, available as an online scheduling SaaS or a proprietary enterprise installation, forecasts customer service demand and delivers schedules that support performance targets, agent preferences, and contact center efficiency. Irene reduces payroll costs, improves work force management call center service levels, and increases employee satisfaction. Whether you are managing thousands of agents globally or a single-site Help Desk schedule with a limited number of agents, Irene meets your needs.
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