Introducing: SuccessKPI’s Workforce Management (WFM)

Running a contact center without an exceptional workforce management (WFM) system is like planning for a vacation without knowing what the weather or location you sleep will be like at your destination.  

Much like ending up in the Arctic with only beach clothing, lacking visibility within your contact center workforce will lead to some highly uncomfortable situations for agents, customers, supervisors, and customers. 

However, traditional WFMs can leave you stressed out—much like a type A uncle during a family vacation. 

Enter: SuccessKPI’s updated WFM 

In this article, you’ll learn how this WFM can help your business: 

• Accurately forecast for your contact center’s live channels using advanced AI algorithms 

• Track important operational metrics with a built-in, powerful analytics platform 

• Save money by reducing complexity and opaqueness for monitoring metrics and decreasing agent attrition 

Let’s get started. 

What’s the Forecast? 

This analogy is a bit on the nose, but much like needing to check the forecast for a vacation, your contact center will benefit significantly from forecasting what is coming down the line. 

No matter what industry your business is in, there will always be fluctuations in contact center traffic throughout the year. For the retail industry, that can be the holidays. And for the travel industry, that can be summer.  

Knowing when those fluctuations will happen empowers businesses to prepare their workforce for it. However, unlike your crystal-collecting friend, most businesses can’t claim to see the future, making it challenging to access accurate forecasts. 

SuccessKPI’s WFM builds accurate forecasts using advanced AI and deep learning algorithms that automatically detect and account for trends and anomalies in your business’s traffic. It enables businesses to forecast traffic and, as a result, the staffing needed for as granular as 15-minute segments of time.  

To do this, the WFM system considers: 

• Incoming traffic 

• Desired SLAs and ASAs 

• Occupancy 

• Projected shrinkage 

And if anything changes, it easily and quickly modifies the forecasts to account for the needed adjustments, helping your business stay prepared. 

Can We Skip the Spreadsheets? 

Most people appreciate having a designated “planner” on a vacation—the person who can keep the flow going so everyone isn’t sitting around arguing about what to do next. This person enables everyone to know where to go, when to go there, and what they’ll be doing there. However, no one enjoys it when that person sends over a million spreadsheets or a controlling agenda. 

The same goes for contact centers. 

Many surprisingly large contact centers are stuck using spreadsheets to perform critical tasks because they can’t simply share data with APIs. This leads to inefficiency to say the least, increased manual work costs, and challenges connecting and monitoring performance metrics. Even more, it makes it nearly impossible to correlate staffing metrics with customer experience metrics such as EWT, FCR, NPS, with adherence—let alone fast enough to be actionable. 

SuccessKPI’s WFM includes simple and fast automated scheduling based on shift plans and constraints as well as easy schedule editing for intraday changes. It also empowers agents with easy-to-use agent schedule views, which allows them to request schedule changes without hassle.  

However, what really sets the updated WFM system apart is the built-in, powerful analytics and dashboards. This includes: 

• Real-time and historical adherence and conformance monitoring dashboards 

• Comprehensive intraday monitoring dashboards, enabling contact centers to stay on top of adjustments needed 

• Dashboards to compare forecasted volume with actual volume, to identify trends and anomalies 

• Cradle to grave reporting for all interactions 

• A full-fledged business intelligence engine to enable you to create your own custom reports and dashboards 

And the list goes on. This WFM system empowers businesses to gain a full picture of customer experience as well as employee experience, all in one place. 

Can We Decrease the Cost? 

Circling back to the first analogy, vacationing without the proper clothing can lead to high costs. Similarly, running a contact center without the right WFM system can lead to unexpected, avoidable costs. 

Most businesses are consistently searching for ways to do more with less, especially if they are working with tight budgets. That’s why it’s important to find a WFM solution that can meet you where you are. 

When training and onboarding are tough to tackle, the burden trickles down to more agents’ work. And when scheduling time off and other operational parts of their jobs are challenging, they aren’t as motivated to stay. Agent churn adds up when the cost to hire and train new employees can be more than $4,700 per hire, according to the Society of Human Resource Management.  

SuccessKPI’s WFM can provide businesses with just what they need with a faster time to value. This leads to better use of technology funds for tighter budgets and smoother adoptions. It also leads to a more satisfying employee experience, especially for agents. 

Learn more about our updated WFM here.