Why Are Top WFM Programs Failing Us?

"I bought an expensive Workforce Management (WFM) tool.  I also hired experienced WFM analysts to use that tool.  To make sure we have all of the relevant data to help us out, we have stockpiled years of historical volume records.  With all of this preparation backing me up, I want to know why I cannot seem to get an efficient and workable employee staffing schedule.”

With great frustration a friend of mine asked me this question a just few days ago.  He was emotional, irritated, and quite puzzled.  My friend is no stranger to real Workforce Management solutions, having worked with several different high level tools off and on for about six years.  His current team has spent the better part of a year trying many strategic planning strategies as well as experimenting with advanced "what if" scenarios to streamline their workforce.  But in spite of all this professional effort, their ACD (Automated Call Distribution) service levels have been hit and miss for most of the year nor have they realized the optimization he hoped for and had realized in previous implementations.

The truth is, this same question is being asked more and more in the last two years or so by many of my clients and working acquaintances and the answer, though plain to see when you have the facts, is not easy to address and because of the complexity of the answers, no instant fix can be expected to pop up as a solution.  But finding answers to this question is something we must do or those of us who face similar WFM issues could be forced out of the business market by competitors who do not give up in the face of such workforce scheduling and optimization difficulties. 

Using WFM tools in order to reach better service levels with less cost while providing more professional customer options is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity. Seventy percent of mainstream contact centers now utilize WFM tools in order to stay in business and every one of them will, undoubtedly, encounter complications, just as we will. In fact, unless we push through every new difficulty we encounter, our competitors (who are willing to push through) will leave us far behind. 

But the truth is, mainstream Workforce Management solutions are not working quite as well as they have previously because we now find ourselves in a new space with many changing communication technology factors that seem to blossom out in front of us every other month.  And since the software algorithms that form the base of most WFM tools took many years to develop and test, the companies making these tools are extremely hard pressed to keep up.  In addition, many of the smaller WFM companies seem blissfully unaware of the changing marketplace factors that we are going to discuss here and they make little effort to change their software packages to meet these changing times.

Here is the problem.  WFM tools have traditionally used historical data to predict future results.  If we use an average work volume and arrival pattern from several weeks of history with factors affecting that history which are similar to the factors we expect to see next week, we should have a decent prediction on what volume and arrival pattern we should expect.  But as mentioned previously, the environment globally is evolving much more quickly now than it has been because of significant technological advances in the way humans exist and work every day of their lives.  What this means is that precise historical work data from the past that accurately matches what will happen next week is becoming extremely harder to come by.  And here are some of the reasons why.

1. Ever Evolving New Media Channels- Traditionally, the biggest ads that reached the most people were almost exclusively placed in radio, television, and newspaper.  These ads reached people at specific, optimum times of the day and one could expect to see higher call volumes during the times these ads were released.  Now we have email, internet web pages, Twitter, Facebook, chat, web TV, and many other channels of communication and advertising that are open 24/7.  This means that our business ads are now seen by our customers at many more random times throughout every day.  All of this spells out a random, unpredictable, and varied time that our clients are likely to call for our services.  Such ever changing variations in call arrival patterns and call volume are beyond the normal expected abilities of a traditional Erlang C formula using simple historical averages to predict with very high accuracy.

 

1. Evolving Modes of Advertising Reaching Varying groups of Customers-  With the traditional old style methods of advertising (radio, television, newspaper), marketing programs reached specific cultural groups who could be expected to call at certain times and could be handled in a predictable manner using specific sets of tool.  Now with the many new types of media being utilized, we are seeing our advertising programs penetrate fresh and different cultural groups that we never accessed before.  These new groups require non-traditional hours of operation and different sets of tools to handle their issues and services.  

3. More Customer Interactions Moving to Multichannel Outlets-  More customer interactions are moving to mobile multichannel Smartphones. This means that many details in the way contacts arrive are changing. For example, customers no longer wait until they arrive home to conduct personal business. They do it on their breaks, on their lunches or in traffic. In addition, many people surveyed admitted to conducting personal business on their Smartphones throughout the entire workday whether they are busy or not. This means call arrival patterns are not as predictable as in times past. In addition, these types of multi-tasking customers tend to be more impatient for a couple of different reasons: 1) Customers who use -per-minute/megabyte plans want answers faster and with more accuracy,  eliminating the need for repeated call backs. 2) Laws in some areas limit how companies go about contacting customers on wireless devices, so the dynamic has become more one-sided.  Each of these factors causes very unpredictable call volumes and unpredictable, non-traditional call arrival patterns.

 

3. Self Service Portals Appearing Everywhere- Many customers now like to begin their contact center interactions via different sorts of web self-service portals. Different research companies such as Frost & Sullivan for instance, have conducted research which shows that customers who use these self service types of channels have some of the highest surveyed levels of customer satisfaction. This means that when we have a new interface for customers to use, the historical volume we look at in the past when such a channel did not exist becomes useless to us now.  In addition, if customers cannot accomplish their goal in a self-service portal for one reason or another, they will want their issues resolved quicker and more expertly by live agents.  And they want this done with minimal or no escalations or repeat calls.  Here again we see an ever evolving and confusing landscape that drastically changes our predictions of when we will need to schedule staff in the future.

5. More Professional Staff a Necessity - Even if we are able to predict accurately when our work contacts will arrive, we cannot any longer depend on agents that just read a script and regurgitate simple customer service skills.  Today's agents must have superior comprehension, expert and flexible customer service, vast sales experience, comprehensive and sophisticated writing, and very soon, even live video communication skills. On top of this, they need higher levels of product or service expertise. If that is not enough, growing Hispanic and Asian populations, coupled with increased buying power, requires more agents who can communicate effectively in these languages.  What this means when it comes to utilizing our WFM tool is that we can no longer create a schedule based on conglomerated Queues and work groups.  Instead we must strain to the max the programs we are using by asking them to predict volume and arrival times of individual skills and by matching employees who have those skills to complicated schedules.  Most WFM products are capable of scheduling this way already, but unfortunately, even the best of them can only do this on a limited basis and they all get bogged down when more than 20 or 30 individual skill groups are utilized.  Many contact centers I work with have anywhere from 80 to 300 skill groups in order to schedule in this modern age.

6. Retaining Customers Causes Random Interactions- As we experience a slower growing economy, the ability to retain customers has become a very important skill.  We spend a lot of money bringing new customers into our sphere of influence and we cannot afford to lose them.  So much effort has been taken to retain customers that we have created new classes of customers: “Loyal Customers, Net Promoters, and Champions”. This class of customer tends to bring in more of their friends and acquaintances into our service influence.  This is great because such an influx of new clients costs very little in advertising dollars.  But what happens is that we have no way of predicting when these loyal customers will bring in their friends and families for us to service. This makes predicting accurate schedules for our staff very difficult for the WFM tool that was built back when such factors did not exist.  Also, “friends and families” means something different than it used to. It used to mean immediate neighbors and extended family.  Now, because of the growing social media influence, friends and family means new acquaintances all over the world. This means we need to be able to serve more people in the "Follow the Sun" model.  One other related factor is changing quickly in today's contact center environments:  Customers now know how important they are and how powerful they are when they come together and with this feeling of power they expect companies to be available whenever they want them to be available. Traditional hours of operation such as 9 to 5 office hours do not stand up against these new expectations.  Especially when the average customers’ ability to impact an organizations’ brand, reputation, and sales has increased markedly via social media.  This means our WFM tool must schedule much longer and harder than it ever used to even as it is trying to add in all of the newer skill factors and hours of operation that are expected.

7. Multiple Channel Connections Becoming Prevalent- Customers are now regularly expecting to be able to use multiple channels to connect with companies. Chat, text, and now video+voice, SMS/text, and social media, are supplementing and sometimes even supplanting live agent voice. The next generation is expected to favor text-based, including speech-to-text, over voice channels.  With these multiple media channels and their associated skills most WFM tools will be strained a hundred fold trying to create a schedule that will reflect even remotely what will really occur in real-time arrival patterns.

8. Home Based Work Force Evolution- The contact center work force has expanded to include home-based agents. Family and medical leave legislation, military service, and volunteer work impact employee availability. The need to reduce agent churn has forced managers to be more flexible with scheduling, including enabling employees to select their hours. Meanwhile, Workforce Management solutions have been a prime tool to ensure service levels through enabling staff forecasting and scheduling. Although WFM solutions are more effective and versatile compared to spreadsheets, the forecasting, staffing, scheduling, strategic planning and performance management models and methodologies built into these solutions can severely constrain the effectiveness and accuracy of a WFM team, and result in waste and poor customer service.

There are several other factors which will negatively impact our ability to accurately forecast and schedule, but these mentioned above are some of the most problematic culprits affecting our efforts today. 

Now that we know and recognize the problems facing us what can we do?  With these ever changing and evolving global environments making the WFM job so difficult to do, how can we cope?

The good news is that even though the current high end WFM tools are slow to catch up to handling all of these new technological changes in business because they are based on formulas which were created many years ago in outdated environments; they are still making heroic attempts to incorporate new modes of operation that will address many of the factors listed above.  Some experts worry, however; that by the time they change their coding to how we need it, the environment will have already radically changed once again and they will never be able to catch up.  The truth is, the larger WFM companies and their tools must either catch up or they will be left behind to die out.  New companies are building fresh, innovative products from the ground up that do not have outmoded thinking to overcome.  These companies are building their products based on where the global environment appears to be going instead of taking years trying to model an environment that is ever changing. Hopefully, they will succeed and we will all breathe easier with new and better tools.

 But what does my friend do until that time?  How can he get his predicted schedules to more closely mirror what eventually happens in the real environment?  He needs to be saving money now and reaching his service levels right now and he cannot wait for the tools to catch up.  Well, as mentioned before, it is not easy to do this but there are measures that can, and need, to be taken. 

 

1)      Make sure that your personnel are highly trained in WFM theory and background so that they can squeeze every ounce of usability out of your current WFM tools.  In order to make our current tools serve us properly, it is even more important to have the most knowledgeable personnel you can find who can modify the tools you are using to gain better scheduling predictability. When you eventually need new WFM people, hire experienced personnel whenever possible and then make sure they are regularly trained in new and updated WFM procedures and market trends.  The reason for this is that your employees are going to have to make up in expertise what the programs currently lack.  They are going to have to be the real brains behind the success of your WFM program.  If you hire mediocre personnel, you will have a poor Workforce program and this could conceivably drive you out of business.

2)      Make certain your WFM personnel have one job to do; WFM.  Do not have them multi-task, do not give them an agent team to supervise on the side, etc.  If you have WFM personnel solely devoted to proper WFM, you will make money off of them instead of losing it. Have backup staff ready to go when your experienced personnel go somewhere else that pays them more money.  I have watched endless WFM programs fail (with significant cost repercussions) because it was thought that backups were too expensive to train or keep on hand.  Big mistake!

3)     Be certain that your WFM staff thoroughly understands how your ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) works and make certain they understand how all of the ACD reporting works.  With the proper ACD information, even the most erratic jumps in arrival patterns and volume can be more closely trended and efficient schedules can be more closely predicted.  Proper trends do not come from your WFM software.  Trends come from the proper analysis of ACD information.  Hardcore trending skills are the single biggest weakness I see in experienced WFM personnel.

4)     Create a close working relationship between marketing personnel and your WFM analysts.  When schedules of marketing releases can be watched and analyzed for trends by experienced WFM trending personnel, more accurate and profit saving schedules can be initiated.  Even in the current erratic arrival patterns we see growing throughout the world, there are trends to be found.  They are just new and non-traditional trend types and patterns.  To find them we must know all advertising channels that are being used and we must know when the calls from them are coming in.  This takes a lot of cooperation and expertise between these two important departments.

5)     Wherever possible, make sure each new scheduling period is analyzed using Six Sigma principles so new improvements are incorporated over each new scheduling period.   Use the DMAIC model. 

1.      (D)efine what happened during the last scheduling period.

2.      (M)easure the scheduling success and the failures. 

3.      (A)nalyze what caused the successes and failures.

4.      (I)mprove on all previous scheduling models.  To do this you will use your updated definition of what happened along with your measurements of success and failure. 

5.      (C)ontrol your improvements.  Make sure they are implemented properly so you can see if your efficiency actually goes up or down.  The problem with most improvements is that they were not implemented properly and there is no way to tell if the changes would have helped or not.  Then do all of this again next week.

Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control.

6)     Analysts must be trained to be more expert at intraday study and schedule improvement.  After a schedule is published and the actual statistics for each day begin to appear, we must have experienced analysts who can adjust your workforce on the fly hour by hour with little negative impact.  Such intraday skills are critical to success in the new, less predictable contact center environment, but most WFM teams are unskilled in this area.

7)     Hire flexible workers.  Yes they are out there.  We need flexible people who will work in these new changing environments. As we find new schedules that need to be met, we have to have the people who are willing to be there when the contacts arrive at the new, non-traditional times.  When you build a culture of employee flexibility and get a "by in" from your agents, they will help you with scheduling instead of interfering with scheduling.   

In order to stay competitive in the current environment, we need to use Workforce Management tools.  If we do not, we will be buried by the competition.  We may be hindered by the features of our current tools, however, if we try to understand where the most changes are occurring, it is possible to outline where we experience the most problems in making accurate schedule predictions.  And when we understand where the problems occur, we can make up for the shortcomings of the tools by utilizing more highly trained staff members who work hard to enhance the effectiveness of our WFM tools.  Finally, always be on the lookout for new tools that will come along to make our efforts easier in the near future.

All of this is not easy to do, but it is worthwhile.  Every day I see reports of companies that save many thousands of dollars a month by using WFM, as I have outlined here, with more highly trained and expert personnel By implementing the steps I have outlined, above, you can use your current workforce management tools to reap the same rewards as these forward-thinking companies until more innovative solutions are available.  Good luck!