How can you leverage workforce management (WFM) to make quick-and-easy wins for your return on investment (ROI)?

I would like to share three real-world scenarios that will turn into wins for your contact centre.

Review the payroll

Assume that everyone in your 100-agent contact centre works a 40-hour work week. How often do you actually need all of your agents working all 40 hours every week? My guess is – probably not all the time.

What if you were to set up your WFM solution to give a range of hours between 38 and 40 hours? Shaving a mere two hours a week across half of your agents quickly turns into significant payroll savings: 2 hours per week x 50 per cent of your agents x £15/hour x 52 weeks = £78,000 of payroll savings per year.

Evaluate forecasted demand v vacation allotment

Most contact centres only allow a blanket number of hours for paid time off (PTO) on any given day, without giving much thought to whether or not the number actually corresponds to the forecast. For example, your forecast may call for a significantly fewer number of hours in the first week of the month as compared to the last week of the month. Are you taking advantage of that lull in your call volume by allowing more vacation in the first week than in the last week of the month?

Now look at your forecasted demand and see if you can bump those vacation allotment numbers up. Not only will this allow you to target your forecast more accurately but your agents will benefit. How? Simply by being able to take additional time off to re-charge their batteries.

Be on the lookout for part-timers

Part-timers can be a gold mine for properly staffed contact centres – if used correctly. Ask your agents if anyone is interested in a part-time, flexible schedule. Set-up the agent preferences module so part-time agents can enter their requirements and then let the scheduler do the work.

There may well be agents who prefer working according to a fixed, part-time schedule but there may others willing to be flexible on a week-to-week basis, therefore allowing the scheduling team to use them to fill in gaps without committing to an excess of hours.

This is just a small sample of approaches that contact centres can take to tackle scheduling and reduce costs. I hope you will find them useful. What has worked for you? Please share them with us. I’m looking forward to hearing more.

Dave Hoekstra has 15 years of contact centre experience and is a workforce management consultant at Teleopti.