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…But part of the same overall process

While I write this, I’m finding myself getting twisted in knots when discussing the process for short term planning, or the process for long term planning, when the whole point of this article is that the two processes are part of the same overarching process. Process, process, process. My friend who pointed out to me the inherent problem with my previous article, had a  very simple point. He posed the following to me: “What happens if you have workforce management without strategic planning or vice versa?”

So let’s discuss this. If you have a workforce management system that works well for your organization, but do not have a capacity planning system, what would happen? The operation would be working in an environment where the decision-making window is extremely short and normal seasonal events are somewhat surprising. Mismatches between staff on hand and  staff required would be common.

In this environment, without a strategic planning process, management’s view would be myopic and the operation would find itself either overstaffed or understaffed more often than necessary. The workforce management process itself would have to work overtime, scrambling for extra bodies or scrambling too often to send agents home. Customer service would be  erratic and customer experience scores could be negatively affected. The operation would feel like chaos too often. In this environment, management, bitten often by understaffing, might opt to habitually overstaff. This operation would be costly and inefficient.

What happens if the contact center had a good capacity planning process but lacked workforce management software? The strategic planning software should determine exactly how many agents to staff each week, given the efficiency of the contact center. Odds are, for normal days, the contact center would hit its service levels consistently. But because the contact center does not have workforce management software, it would be, almost by definition, inefficiently staffed (it is very difficult to schedule agents efficiently by hand or with a spreadsheet). This
operation would need to hire too many agents to hit their service goals, because they are deployed and scheduled wrong. The operation would be much more costly than it otherwise would be.

But what about non-normal days? On days where there was a disruption, like a center outage, a weather event, or an unknown marketing event, the center would not be able to react to intra-day emergencies quickly and would likely take a service hit without good workforce management software.

One last point. What if the operation employs both systems, but one is deficient? All large contact center operations utilize workforce management software, but many use home-grown spreadsheets to provide capacity planning. These spreadsheets are often complex and error prone. If the spreadsheet is sub-par, if its models are not validated or it doesn’t include capacity planning optimization algorithms (most don’t), then the result will be an operation that will see many of the problems we’ve discussed. The operation will use inaccurate
forecasts, will provide capacity plans that are inefficient, and will see mismatches between staff required and staff provided to the operation.

It’s One Process

The point of this discussion really is to highlight something that most of us probably know that it is important to provide great longer term plans so that in the short term, the operation is easier to manage.

But also, contact center strategic/capacity planning and workforce management are truly two sides to the same coin. And one combined process that ensures that we have the right number of agents available at the right time in order to appropriately service our customer contacts.