Why Work Planning and Scheduling Must Be Normalized to the Smallest Planning Interval

Workforce management is designed to help companies provide best-in-class service in the most cost-effective way possible. With labor costs accounting for the majority of contact center costs—around 70%, according to ICMI—maximizing each agent labor dollar is critically important in today’s economy.

Workforce managers must allocate available agent resources against the contact center’s current needs. It’s a complex undertaking, given that customer patience and willingness to wait can vary greatly depending on the type of contact.

For example, people are much more accepting of a delay in response when they reach out to a company via email vs. phone; this can lead an organization to strive to answer all emails within 24 hours but answer 80% of inbound calls in 20 seconds or less. Historically, workforce managers have forecasted and scheduled contacts that have different service levels separately.

With the increase in digital channels, however, it is increasingly common to have omnichannel, blended work streams where an employee spreads their time across many different channels simultaneously or even spreads their time across different types of tasks. This has made it much more difficult to view and manage staffing requirements across contact center, back-office, and digital teams.

If you truly want to blend work items, whether that's from your digital office into your contact center, your contact center into your back office, or your back office into the digital office, you need a common planning interval to be able to understand what work needs to be performed, regardless of the environment it's housed or organized in. And while many digital channels have an average handle time (AHT) that exceeds the standard planning interval, it’s simply not reasonable to expect a contact center to move away from the 15- or 30-minute interval and forecast the number of people they need for the entire day in order to cross-utilize people with the back office, which is much less sensitive to 30-minute increments.

That’s why work planning and scheduling must be normalized to the smallest planning interval for blended work items. That means taking longer asynchronous work (whether that's from a digital contact center or from a back office), standardizing the time it takes to handle an interaction, and using this standard time per interaction to forecast call volume and schedule agents. 

Understanding requirements at the interval level, whether it be 15 or 30 minutes, allows for greater insight into service level performance. Doing so, however, requires the ability to decompose these contacts into the amount of time and number of contacts worked in each interval, so workforce managers can determine accurate interval staffing requirements.

Viewing the requirements both at the channel level and through a holistic view allows workforce management teams to determine when and how to allocate resources based on channel and customer demand, when demand exceeds the current resources scheduled.  It also allows companies to provide a more consistent service level across each channel. 

We've squeezed so much out of the contact center. The next frontier is figuring out how we gain efficiencies by combining the digital office with the traditional voice contact center and the back office. By enabling workforce management teams to understand the true number of resources available by channel—and also understand how to best leverage them—contact centers can make best-in-class service, in the most cost-effective manner, a reality. Learn more about how NICE WFM is helping contact centers plan and forecast blended work streams more accurately.