Part 3: Intraday Management Skills

If you’ve been following along in this series you know the skills required to produce an accurate forecast and optimized schedules, but without effective intraday management your efforts towards these first two steps of the WFM process will be lost. Therefore, you must take the proper steps to ensure the plan is working. This is the art and science of intraday management.

• It’s tracking and analyzing all the individual components that drive service to determine what’s worrisome and what’s not.
• It’s communicating any relevant impact of service to the necessary stakeholders.
• It’s creating strategies for reacting where necessary and managing all the various sorts of activities that take agents off the phone throughout the day.

Part 2: Skills for Creating Optimized Schedules

"Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers."

This quote from Stephen R. Covey, business author and successful entrepreneur, is not just for executives to internalize. It also applies to workforce managers.

Workforce managers determine how many staff are assigned to a shift and which employee takes which specific shift. Their scheduling decisions, therefore, can have a huge impact on employee satisfaction. If they schedule too few agents for a shift, agents will become overloaded and stressed. Customers will notice this immediately. They have to wait longer until they are connected to an agent and then often have to deal with a stressed agent who has no time to answer all questions in detail.

Moreover, if workforce managers take little or no consideration of agents' preferences when planning shifts, agents may be less satisfied and be less motivated to perform well and provide good customer service. So when it comes to creating shift plans, workforce managers have a big responsibility.

Part 1: Workload Forecasting Skills

In contact centers today, roughly 65% to 75% of the total operating cost is consumed through paying  the frontline staff. For that reason, the biggest opportunity for contact centers to manage or reduce cost is to optimize the utilization of their frontline workforce. To do this, most contact centers today have a workforce manager or an entire workforce management (WFM) department.