Today’s contact center is facing a perfect storm of challenges. The lasting effects of the pandemic on consumer and employee behavior have combined with an increase in the use of digital channels and bots for customer service, resulting in a fundamental shift in how the workforce needs to be managed. This shift has lasting implications for how contact centers plan and forecast while meeting customer and employee demands.

Here’s what you need to know to make sure your workforce management processes meet the new demands of the modern, increasingly digital contact center.

Employee Behaviors Are Evolving

For the first time in history, four generations — Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z — are working together in the workplace. Traditionally, each generation has had distinct preferences when it comes to communication, with older generations relying heavily on voice communications that take place in real time and require an immediate response from customer service teams. Younger generations, in contrast, have been known for their reliance on non-voice modes of communication like mobile apps and social media, which are characterized by back-and-forth communications that allow for time between responses.

But the pandemic turned those generational norms on their head. It accelerated digital transformation, increasing adoption of digital channels as well as boosting the tech-savviness of the broader workforce. Workers of all ages became comfortable with newer communication modes as employees embraced non-voice, asynchronous communication methods like Slack, SharePoint, or ASANA as part of day-to-day work.

This comfort with digital communications spilled over into workers’ personal lives as well, which means Gen Z and Boomers have joined their younger counterparts in using non-voice, asynchronous interactions when they interact with the businesses they buy from. All generations expect to be able to communicate on the channel of their choice, at the time of their choosing.

With such a sea change in how people prefer to interact, contact centers have had to rethink how they provide a great experience to their customers and agents alike.

Employees Demand Greater Flexibility

The pandemic also irrevocably changed how and where employees work. Rather than having a piece of work to be completed (e.g., answering a customer call) while the agent is in the office, the agent is now a participant in a work stream with many activities underway (e.g., juggling multiple chats or responding via email to a customer whose interaction began on the phone with another agent the day before). They’re working remotely or in a hybrid model, and they increasingly expect to be able to balance their work and professional lives more easily.

This has resulted in more flexible work assignments and much more flexible planning, scheduling, and forecasting. Companies are increasingly rethinking the workspace itself, with floor plans designed to make it easy for agents to connect with the people and resources needed to resolve customers’ issues, and the activities they assign their contact center agents.

Digital Channels Have Changed Customer Service

Workforce management (WFM) teams are increasingly realizing that digital channels have changed the nature of work in the contact center. Interactions can now take hours or days. Digital channels like email or chat often have long breaks between responses, increasing the elapsed time between when the contact begins and when it ends.

And bots are making customer service significantly more complex. As contact centers increasingly leverage bots to handle simpler, more routine inquiries, agents are left with more time-consuming interactions. Perhaps bots handle simple items like address changes or payment date, but a customer inquiry about a disputed charge is routed to an agent. When interactions are more complex, it typically takes longer to understand the issue, conduct research, and communicate steps to resolution — all of which increase average handle time (AHT).

But because there’s no need to schedule a bot, WFM teams often fail to take into account the impact bots have on their processes. Long handle times can be challenging for contact centers that use traditional WFM solutions, which operate well when AHT is shorter than the planning interval. Newer tools overcome this hurdle by decomposing work items into the activities occurring in each interval, improving forecasted staff requirements.

The Old Ways of Reporting Data No Longer Suffice

Contact centers have long planned and forecasted in intervals of 15 or 30 minutes, depending on the business’ unique characteristics, historical interaction patterns, and evolving call volume trends. But digital channels have changed the nature of work due to the increased length of interactions and long breaks between responses, which increase the elapsed time between when the contact begins and when it ends. As a result, waiting until a contact ends before seeing any information about the contact makes it impossible to plan work effectively across planning intervals.

Consider the following examples at one company, Acme Inc., which operates in 15-minute intervals.

• Email: An agent, Maya, completes an email at 2:57 p.m., and the contact is reported as completed. The reported handling time cannot exceed 15 minutes based on current workforce management (WFM) standards, so the 12 minutes of time Maya spends handling the email is the only data point transmitted to the company’s WFM solution. This fails to account for the 48 total minutes spent on the email by three other employees before Maya jumped in to handle the interaction. The proper way to account for this would be to continue reflecting the contact as completed during the 2:45 to 3 p.m. interval, but Acme needs a way to reflect the time spent working on the contact outside of that interval.
• Social media: A customer posts to Acme’s Facebook page at 1:20 p.m. Matthew is the first agent to respond on behalf of the company; he spends 8 minutes crafting a response before posting to Facebook at 1:37 p.m. The customer replies to Michael’s post at 2:13 p.m., and another agent, Olivia, works on a response for 6 minutes before posting it at 2:32 p.m. The customer responds with one final question at 3:12 p.m., and a third agent, Jacob, spends 7 minutes drafting a response before posting it at 3:47 p.m. Due to antiquated data reporting, Acme only accounts for 15 minutes of handling time during the 3:45 to 4 p.m. interval, and it only recognizes the person that handled the contact in that ending interval — in this instance, Jacob. The source system tried to send a 21-minute handling time, but Acme’s WFM solution rounded it down to the interval length of 15 minutes; the actual handle time, however, was 21 minutes across three people over six intervals.

As these examples illustrate, traditional WFM applications have two major shortcomings: work items that span multiple planning intervals are treated as a single work item that occurs in a single interval, and asynchronous work is treated the same as synchronous work. Both shortcomings lead to planning and scheduling inaccuracy.

WFM processes are designed to ensure that you have the right people in place at the right time, but if you are not accounting for all of the time spent working on contacts, your projections will be inaccurate. Instead of waiting until a contact ends, contact centers need to start reporting when activity occurs — when the first agent takes action on an email or Facebook post — and report when a contact becomes active again. By deconstructing these conversations into something that’s usable for WFM purposes at the lowest granularity the organization needs (e.g., 15 or 30 minutes), WFM teams can create forecasts, staffing requirements, and schedules driven by patterns of interval-specific activity rather than case counts and the interval in which a contact ends.

Looking to the Future

The nature of work has changed, and businesses need a workforce management solution and processes capable of meeting the evolving demands of customers, agents, and the workplace itself. Learn more about how NICE WFM is helping contact centers plan and forecast more accurately given the new characteristics of customer service interactions in an increasingly digital world.

With NICE (Nasdaq: NICE), it’s never been easier for organizations of all sizes around the globe to create extraordinary customer experiences while meeting key business metrics. Featuring the world’s #1 cloud native customer experience platform, CXone, NICE is a worldwide leader in AI-powered self-service and agent-assisted CX software for the contact center – and beyond. Over 25,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 companies, partner with NICE to transform – and elevate – every customer interaction across all channels. For more information, visit our website at https://www.nice.com/.