Workforce Management

Business Systems’ partner, Teleopti, has been named a top Workforce Management (WFM) provider by DMG Consulting LLC in the 2016 WFM Product and Market Report. As detailed in the report, Teleopti WFM received a perfect overall customer satisfaction score and also achieved a perfect rating in key categories including training, implementation, vendor communication and product innovation. Overall, Teleopti WFM ranked ahead of other major WFM vendors like NICE, Aspect and Verint. Working with a partner that has been rated top...

A Definition of Workforce Management Workforce management (WFM) is built to maintain efficient workforce planning and efficient workforce management forecasting. WFM technology includes functionality which contact centres need including scheduling, workforce planning, shift trading and schedule optimisation. It allows workforce planners to quickly and easily allocate the right employees, with the right skill sets at the right time in order to meet service level agreements in the most efficient and cost effective way possible. It allows planners to forecast required...

Workforce management (WFM) technology provides the necessary means to maintain a productive and skilled workforce. Having the right resource, in the right place, at the right time is vital in ensuring your organisation builds a reputable and positive customer experience whilst workforce planning. You’re probably aware that there is a number of different WFM solutions and WFM vendors available to choose from in the marketplace. Sometimes you may even feel spoilt for choice. So how do you decide which of...

Increase Motivation and Drive Performance Within Your Team with Gamification Keeping staff engaged at all times, or even for good part of the working day can be challenging, especially in the contact centre environment, where tasks are repetitive and the day is strictly planned. One of the main pain points for contact centre managers is keeping motivation high and maintaining engagement in order to attract and retain quality customer service representatives and consistently drive high levels of customer care. The...

Police force command and control and contact centres operate in a highly pressurised environment where having the right amount of staff in place to handle inbound emergency calls is critical when workforce planning. Over the years police forces have excelled in benchmarking how other industries apply workforce management (WFM) technology and assessing whether the application of that technology could work in their own environment. Thanks to the rise of social media and the increasing public profile of many forces, this...

CONTACT CENTRE GUIDE BLOG: 7/9 - How to Power up Staff with Gamification MyCustomer.com recently published ‘The Contact Centre Guide’ which was sponsored by Business Systems. For those short on time, we created a series of blogs covering the highlights from each chapter. Our 7th blog is around Gamification. With thanks to Scott Buchanan from NICE Systems who provided the original article. The issue of employee engagement is a growing source of tension for service organisations. As customers increasingly resolve...

Teleopti have specialised in selling workforce management (WFM) technology for over 20 years and have come a long way since those early start up days in Sweden. With a strong global footprint the company continues to grow its UK customer base - we wanted to find out what’s driving this growth. 1. Teleopti focus solely on what they do best - Workforce Management There are number of bigger manufacturers out there who focus on producing multiple technology solutions, whereas Teleopti’s...

Workforce management (WFM) technology has moved on leaps and bounds in the last 5 or 6 years so how confident are you that the system you bought into years ago is still fit for purpose in today’s challenging and complex customer environment? We outline four key areas below that could signal it’s time for a change. 1. Struggling to schedule and forecast for non phone-based interactions Can your existing WFM system plan, forecast and schedule agents to cover multiple contact...

Alternative Networks, one of the UK's leading providers of telephony services, including voice, mobile, systems and IT solutions have joined forces with call recording and workforce optimisation (WFO) specialists Business Systems, to provide best in class service and support for their customers’ call recording and WFO needs. Highly regarded as experts in this area, customers of Alternative Networks regularly seek advice on upgrading and supporting their call recording systems, particularly where telephony projects in some way impact their existing recording...

In this blog we highlight the key elements of a WFM planning real time management strategy and cover some best practice tips. 1) Agree WFM Adherence thresholds When considering schedule adherence in terms of WFM planning, it may be worthwhile rolling it out to a pilot team initially so any tweaks and fine tuning can be made before deploying it to the wider operation. The proposed targets should be discussed and agreed with the Operation. Ensure the agents are aware...

Last Updated March 2020 What is WFM Real-Time management in a call centre? Workforce Management real-time management is proactively managing the contacts and queues “on the day” to ensure service levels and business targets are met. This means taking the resource plan and forecasts and monitoring volumes throughout the day, acting if thresholds are transgressed and enabling service recovery plans if required. You can spend countless hours perfecting a forecast, creating a schedule that matches forecasted workload requirements, or capacity planning...

WFM Scenario Planning – What If... There are a number of different scenarios a workforce planning team will be asked to provide direction for within a business. This may involve long term capacity planning to support target operating models down to intra-day ‘what if’ type analysis. Some examples of WFM scenario planning are: Multi Skilling – what does our skills matrix look like and is it fit for purpose? Site Strategy – what’s the impact of opening our new site? Opening...

In a recent webinar, centred around hosted workforce management, Business Systems hosted with Call Centre Helper, 60% of attendees stated that they still use excel spreadsheets to manage their workforce planning. Dispelling common misconceptions and introducing the concept of how a managed service approach could work using hosted workforce management, this paper identifies how the technology is becoming increasingly accessible to all organisations regardless of size and internal resource skills. Addressing how more flexible demand workforce planning could be rolled...

Agent workforce planning & workforce scheduling provides a great opportunity for the planning team to gain buy in from the operation and agents. It presents an opening to highlight the value of the team and also the benefits and flexibility of your workforce management (WFM) application. Include the Resource Planning Operation in the Process If you are deploying WFM or creating a new set of resource planning schedules consider including the agents in the process. As we discussed in our last...

Our last blog highlighted what makes an effective short term forecast. These are the forecasts that you will apply your workforce schedules against and in this post we will cover tips for creating and applying best practice WFM scheduling. Customer Experience vs Expense Resource optimisation and resource planning is in simple terms, an attempt to balance service expectations against expense or operating costs. The key to optimising resource and minimising expense is the creation of effective shift patterns that meet...

In the last blog we covered long term forecasts and what components are required. Today we will be covering another key component of the WFM forecasting process - special days and special distribution patterns. Forecasting within WFM for 'Special Days' All forecasts from long term down to intra-day need to take special days and special distributions into account. A special day may be: - a national holiday - a specific event - the day after a specific event. - a...

One of the key challenges for any planning team is the need to supply accurate long term forecasts providing capacity, workforce planning, and resource planning for an organisation. What are Long Term Forecasts? It generally means workforce planning forecasts that are used to provide input into budget setting, target operating models or 1-5 year plans. A business may even consider a today +1month as a long term forecast. Regardless of timescales, there is a common aim; to supply input into...

Imagine what you could accomplish with access to external workforce management (WFM) specialists, who could generate forecasts, create work schedules and analyse processes using your data - providing you with the most effective workforce planning for customer support. For smaller organisations who previously could not afford this resource, the ability to implement workforce management as a managed service for workforce planning will be a key trend to watch in 2012. If you haven’t moved beyond excel spreadsheets for planning and scheduling, a...

This week we will be looking at what to consider for resource planning short term forecasting and how to avoid some common pitfalls. What is Short Term Forecasting? By short term forecasting I am referring to the workforce planning forecasts that you will create requirements and apply the schedules against. Or in simple terms, the ones you will use for intra-day management. In terms of the forecast volumes for each contact type it is important to consider the historical data....

Workforce Management (WFM) Case Study Atkins is the largest multi-disciplinary consultancy in Europe and the world’s eleventh largest international design firm employing approximately 16,000 employees globally. Atkins delivers a range of professional property asset management services to thousands of properties across the UK and manages the demand / supply interface via a customer focused helpdesk of 100 operators, based in Leeds. In order to manage their workforce planning, Atkins were looking for a reliable Workforce Management (WFM) solution. The helpdesk...

We thought it timely to update this article with the latest features on WFM and how this can reduce attrition. To read the latest article on this topic check out our most recent blog article - 'How to reduce attrition rates with workforce Management' > With reports from ContactBabel saying that staff attrition in UK call centres has risen for the 5th consecutive year and is now running at 32% we thought it timely to look at one of the...