A typical day in the contact center is a constant balancing act between staffing levels, customer demand, and service quality. Tasked with doing more with less, workforce management teams are looking to ensure that the right agents, with the right skills, are in the right place, at the right time, to help customers with their issues.
It’s not unlike Goldilocks’ journey in the classic childhood fairytale. Just as Goldilocks needed to find a porridge that was neither too hot nor too cold and a bed that was neither too hard nor too soft, contact centers need to find a staffing level that is neither too high nor too low … it needs to be just right. Too many agents can lead to overstaffing and wasted costs, while too few agents can lead to understaffing and long wait times for customers.
While Goldilocks simply runs away, never to return, contact center leaders today have a more sophisticated approach to getting forecasting just right. They’re increasingly turning to NICE CXone Workforce Management (WFM) to strike the perfect balance by forecasting customer demand, scheduling agents accordingly, and tracking their performance. This helps contact centers ensure that they have the right number of agents on hand to meet customer demand without overspending.
How CXone WFM predicts future contact center workloads
Forecasting in the cloud-based CXone WFM solution works through a series of steps and processes to predict future customer interaction volumes and staffing requirements:
- Data collection and integration: You can think of forecasting for the contact center much like you’d think of forecasting how many customers a restaurant will have on a Saturday night. If you’re managing the restaurant, you could look at historical data from past Saturday nights to get a good idea of how many customers to expect; the same principle applies to forecasting customer interactions.
Historical data is crucial for understanding past interaction patterns. CXone WFM collects and integrates historical data, giving you insight into how customers have interacted with your business in the past. This includes information on dialer calls, voice calls, email inquiries, chat interactions, and other relevant digital interactions.
- Data analysis: Analyzing data carefully allows you to gain valuable insights into how customers interact with your business. This information can be further used to forecast future customer interactions and make better business decisions. CXone WFM analyzes historical data from different perspectives, including examining daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal variations in interaction volumes, identifying patterns and trends, and considering any external factors that may affect the customer interactions (for example, upcoming holidays or economic conditions).
- Forecasting with algorithms: New, advanced algorithms and techniques enable you to improve forecasting accuracy and adapt to changing business needs. But you need algorithms that are just right—not too simple, nor too complex, but able to optimize and deliver accurate forecasts. CXone WFM uses multiple models to calculate forecasts using historical data; each model is a time-series algorithm that calculates the forecast differently. Algorithms include time-series analysis, Box-Jenkins ARIMA, exponential smoothing, curve fitting, additive and multiplicative triple exponential Smoothing, and best-fit. The solution continues to integrate new algorithms and techniques to improve forecasting accuracy and adapt to changing business needs.
- Omni-channel forecasting: Customers today expect to be able to communicate with a business on the channel of their choice—they may start by browsing your website, then email with a question, and later call customer service for more information. CXone WFM forecasts demand for multiple communication channels, such as phone calls, emails, chat sessions, and social media interactions. Omni-channel forecasting helps organizations understand how customers are interacting with them across different channels, so you can plan staffing and resources effectively, improving customer service, reducing costs, and increasing efficiency.
- Intraday forecasting: Customer demand can fluctuate throughout the day, making it imperative to be able to update forecasts as new data becomes available. CXone WFM offers real-time and intraday forecasting capabilities, so you can update forecasts and staffing levels on the fly. The solution uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze historical data and current trends. By identifying patterns and trends in customer demand, CXone WFM generates accurate and up-to-date forecasts.
- Scenario planning: Scenario planning can help organizations develop more robust and flexible forecasts. CXone WFM allows users to create and evaluate different scenarios, for example a new product or competitor launch, a recession, a marketing campaigns or special promotion, or anticipated spikes in call volumes. CXone WFM then uses the scenario information to generate forecasts for each scenario, so you can develop a plan to mitigate risks and take advantage of opportunities.
- Staffing: Forecasting uses historical data to predict scheduling needs and build a staffing plan. CXone WFM then uses the staffing plan to generate schedules, ensuring that you have the right number of agents, with the right skills, to meet customer demand without overstaffing or understaffing.
- Real-time adherence, reporting, and analytics: Once your staffing plan and schedules are in place, you need to make sure that teams are adhering to them. CXone WFM provides real-time adherence monitoring, enabling workforce managers to track agent adherence to schedules and make immediate adjustments if needed to align staffing levels with the forecasted demand. The solution also offers robust reporting and analytics capabilities, including key performance indicators (KPIs) and insights to help evaluate the accuracy of forecasts and the performance of the workforce in meeting service-level targets.
- Insight into the true number of resources available by channel: CXone WFM now comes with a cool new feature called the Answered & Active True to Interval (TTI) paradigm, which unlocks a smarter way of tracking how well your team is doing. In the past, WFM solutions only counted the work when a customer contact was fully done. Now, with TTI, you can also pay attention to when your team is working on a contact but hasn't finished it yet. This provides a more realistic picture of what's happening and is particularly valuable when you’re dealing with digital-first omnichannel (DFO) channels that involve various ways of reaching out to customers—like chat, email, or social media. With TTI, you have a better handle on how your team is handling these long-duration types of interactions. It helps you plan better, know what your team needs, and understand what's going on during the day.
"Goldilocks and the Three Bears" is more than a story about a little girl and a family of bears; it also offers timeless wisdom on the importance of balance. CXone WFM delivers balance by enabling you to manage labor costs efficiently while maintaining your desired level of customer service with powerful forecasting tools that help ensure that staffing levels are just right. A user-friendly interface allows workforce managers to easily adjust schedules and monitor performance.
Learn more about how CXone WFM’s forecasting capabilities rely on the Goldilocks principle to help you strike a balance and create a workforce management plan that’s just right for your organization.