Adoption of digital channels, from email and chat to SMS and social media, has skyrocketed due to the pandemic, placing new demands on contact centers. The old ways of collecting data, calculating staffing needs, and generating schedules – then doing it all again as conditions change – no longer suffice when dealing with digital channels. In a marked contrast to the past, work today doesn’t necessarily flow sequentially, in a continuous stream of work handled by a single employee. It’s now nonsequential and noncontiguous in nature, and that has a significant impact on everything from data integrity and acquisition to staff requirement calculation, schedule optimization, and change management. 

Here’s an overview of the changes – and the workforce management challenges you need to consider as a result. 

Immediate Response & Deferred Response Contacts

Employees today are tasked with handling both immediate response contacts, such as phone and chat, and deferred response contacts, like email. How you report service objectives for deferred work, however, will differ from how you report service level for immediate response contacts, and this has an impact on historical data reporting. You also need to calculate accurate and trustworthy staff requirements for each of those two types of contacts and using Erlang to account for multiskill efficiency or taking a workload approach when dealing with deferred response contacts can be complicated in contact centers that use omni-session handling or have multi-concurrency or multiple simultaneous interactions. To optimize schedules with multi-skilled employees, you need to understand how their work is going to be distributed against the concurrent, noncontiguous contact streams.  And you need to manage your backlog and reforecast as the day progresses and supply fails to match up with demand.

Deferred Work Forecasts Based On Capacity

With a digital channel such as email, contacts are often deferred. You may, for example, give agents 24 hours to work on an email, and that has implications for forecasting. And when staff is shared, with inbound work like chats or phone calls, it can affect how work is propagated into the future. Deferred work forecasts based on capacity create new challenges in how you plan for work that is going to be spread over the course of time, considering staff capacity per interval rather than a flatline distribution of work across time. They affect how you optimize and allocate multi-skilled employees’ time to each work stream. And they have an impact on how you manage the backlog, make intraday reforecasts, and analyze supply capacity changes to adjust to the peaks and valleys of the demands you’re placing on employees.

Session Concurrency Within and Across Channels

When you have multiple interactions happening simultaneously or interactions that overlap, understanding average handle time (AHT) and utilization becomes much more complex. Your workforce management system also needs to be able to understand how each employee copes when handling multiple interactions concurrently – what one agent can accommodate with ease can overwhelm another.  How do you interpret AHT (in focus vs. elapsed) and handle intra-interaction utilizations and messaging (the amount of downtime or wait time for both the customer and the employee)? How do you interpret multi-session handling limits? Your definitions, as well as your objectives for maximum utilization, speed of answer and speed of response, will affect your staffing requirements calculations and schedule optimization. 

Channel Interrupt Priorities

One digital channel is often more important than another when it comes to delivering the service your customers demand, and many organizations prioritize work streams accordingly. Often, it’s the immediate response channels (e.g., phone and chat) that are given more attention, more quickly, by interrupting agents’ work on lower priority interaction channels. Which interactions can be interrupted, and how do interruptions affect the AHT for different types of interactions?  This, in turn, will affect how you calculate staffing needs and schedule employees. 

Long Asynchronous Interactions

While customers expect an immediate response with some types of digital interactions, others are often characterized by long gaps in time; a conversation that starts on one day can actually finish the next day or even further into the future. Do you use a hybrid approach, hybrid transaction counting, or work time concatenation to account for the gaps within a customer interaction? How you define AHT and treat the data coming into your WFM system has significant implications for staffing, scheduling, and planning.