Every contact center faces the challenge of efficiently forecasting and scheduling agents. Whether it’s a question of seasonal traffic, new products and services, specific skill requirements, or intraday changes, effective management of agents can be a daunting proposition. This is where Workforce Management software solutions for the contact center can help. Workforce Management solutions can provide the tools needed to ease the challenge. Designed specifically for contact centers, workforce management software can deliver a host of benefits, allowing contact centers to quickly adapt agent staffing levels by anticipating, planning and responding to the rapidly changing demands of their customers. A robust communications system is typically built into a modern workforce management solution, particularly one built for contact center operations. With an increasing number of agents working remotely, enabling multiple channel bi-directional notification/communication tools has become a must-have component.

7 Benefits of Workforce Management Solutions in Contact Centers

Forecast Staffing Needs

When developing for contact centers, a workforce management solution should deliver multiple forecasting methods (dynamic, static, date range, excel data, manual data entry), factor in fluctuating demand, service levels, and more.

• Service level objectives
• Shrinkage profiles
• Single or multi-skilled forecasting
• Multiple forecasting methods – dynamic, static, date range, excel data, manual data entry

Single or Multi-Skilled Forecasting

Workforce management solutions allow you to compare the efficiency of single versus multi-skilled staff plans. This enables accurate scheduling for agents with needed skills using automated forecasting.

Flexible Scheduling

An intuitive interface will allow scheduling managers to concentrate on their tasks, not the software. Flex schedules with intelligent intra-day dashboards notify agents of changes to their schedules, available shifts or pending requests. The software should allow managers to measure cost versus coverage, and establish their individual efficiency goals. Once set, the schedule should be easy to distribute via automated notifications.

• Schedule bidding for agents
• Scheduling unnamed agents
• Five scheduling methods – fixed, floating, rotating, composite, common day floating

Real-Time Agent Adherence

Increases in agent adherence can be achieved through the use of workforce management tools. Monitor schedule adherence, remotely or on-site, to significantly improve agent productivity. Consider: in a 100-agent contact center, a 10% increase in agent productivity is the equivalent of adding ten agents into the schedule pool, without having to hire a single person.

Agent Portals

Quickly and easily communicate with your workforce via Agent Portals, including mobile apps. Developed specifically for the contact center industry, the content of portals should be easily customized for agents, supervisors, scheduling managers, and administrators. With proper configuration, implementation and training, portals aid contact centers with optimizing payroll while improving employee productivity and the customer experience.

Ease of Integration

Like most modern systems, a workforce management solution should provide a high degree of interoperability with other software platforms, on-premise or in the cloud. This allows you to use data targets to extract key data per your schedule and share it with other systems; automatically integrating via APIs.

All-Inclusive Licensing

These workforce management solutions should be flexible and easy to acquire, with clear, no-nonsense licensing plans, ideally including unlimited supervisor & scheduler licenses.

Encore Workforce Management Solutions

Encore® Workforce Management solutions for scheduling staff help contact centers exceed service level objectives while controlling costs. Encore leverages cutting-edge technology and unique, innovative features to forecast and schedule single or multiple skill teams for contact centers. Download the Arizona Federal Credit Union case study to learn how Encore, by ChorusCX, keeps systems and integrations up to date, delivering new applications to meet the evolving requirements and demands of today’s contact centers.