“Hey Chef, Can You Feed My Family With Twenty Bucks?” – The Challenge of Doing More with Less

A new trend on TikTok features an influencer challenging a renowned chef to prepare a gourmet family meal on a $20 budget. The chef is shown shopping for the right mix of budget-friendly herbs, spices, veggies, and meat, even putting items back on the shelf if the final total goes over $20. The chef then prepares and serves a beautifully plated meal fit for a five-star restaurant.

With the videos garnering tens of thousands—and even hundreds of thousands—of views each, it’s clear that this trend has tapped into a key pain point in today’s economy: Everyone is looking to do more with less. Parents are looking to feed their families on salaries that haven’t kept pace with inflation, businesses are under pressure to drive growth despite decreases in revenue, and call centers are challenged to meet their service-level agreements (SLAs) with fewer agents.

In the contact center, an efficient schedule is the workforce manager’s equivalent of the $20 gourmet meal. With many organizations making widespread staffing reductions in the face of a looming recession, workforce managers must generate and manage schedules while facing a decrease in their greatest resource—their agents.

Increasingly, they are turning to modern workforce management tools to do more with less. NICE CXone WFM’s multi-skill scheduling engine is ideal for contact centers that need to maximize their resources. The solution equips the workforce manager with powerful features that ensure optimal agent scheduling, including:

• Discrete event simulation for schedule optimization: CXone WFM offers an AI-based closed-loop discrete event simulation model that enables you to identify patterns and improve scheduling.
• Schedule management view with by-interval and weekly net staffing heat maps: Workforce managers can access a daily view of agents’ schedules that uses a heat map to indicate the difference between the number of people required and the number currently scheduled in each interval, while a weekly view provides a higher-level analysis at a glance.
• Work rules with options for consistent start time, consistent break and lunch times, and consecutive days off: You can choose to define a consistent start time for shifts generated with this rule, with all shifts beginning at the same time, regardless of employee shift preferences; define a consistent start time for an employee's breaks and lunches during the week; and ensure that employees who have multiple days off in a workweek only scheduled to work consecutive days only.
• Weekly rule rotations: Rotation rules let your WFM team automate how shifts are rotated based on weekly rules for your employees; this enables the contact center to balance shifts evenly between employees. You can add several weekly rules to a rotation, with the cycle starting over at the end of the week.
• Max/min seats: Seat limits allow you to define a maximum and minimum number of employees you want to generate a schedule for during operating hours. You can choose to define a maximum/minimum or set limits for only some periods of time on some days.
• Schedule bidding with agent rule assignment: You can choose to give agents options for weekly schedules and allow them to select the schedule they prefer; if multiple agents want the same schedule, they then bid on it.

The benefits aren’t limited to the workforce manager, though. The CXone WFM Engagement Manager empowers agents by enabling them to trade shifts with one another while still maintaining equilibrium within the schedule. And Engagement Manager’s mobile app helps ensure that agents are engaged and adhering to their schedules—both of which are critical to your ability to do more with less—by providing agents with schedule notifications, shift trades, visibility, and flexibility... all from their phone.

With the NICE CXone WFM suite, your chefs—aka your workforce managers—are armed with the tools necessary to craft their $20 gourmet meals.

Learn more about how CXone WFM can help you optimize schedules, ensuring that you can do more with less.