2015 Tip of the Week Archive2018-05-09T13:41:20-04:00

All roads lead to workforce management?

September 21 – Workforce Management is the intersection of Operations, Reporting, Analytics, Telecom, HR, Payroll, Finance, Quality, Client Services, and Training … and then some. Intersection may not be the best way to describe it, but Workforce Management is really more of a traffic circle between all of these points. Think about it, what other […]

Long-term questions deserve long-term analyses.

September 14 –  Every so often, we see a spreadsheet process that only determines staff plans for ninety days or so. While real-world activities, like outsourcer locks, mean that these timeframes are important, they do not preclude the importance of using long-term analyses for long-term business problems. Many of the decisions our operations make are […]

How to address overstaffing in the call center.

September 7 –   We are all familiar with the concept of overtime. When we require more staff than we can provide on certain days and intervals, we have a staffing shortage. If this shortage is significant enough, we offer overtime to fill the need. But what happens when we have more staff than we need […]

Teaching needed skills to resource and capacity planning teams.

August 31 –  When building staff plans, it’s important to understand what can impact future staffing decisions. Three things to consider are average handle time (AHT), call volume, and when/where your new hires are going into production. Teaching your resource planners how to analyze these areas will put your call center into a much more […]

Remember the lumberjack!

August 17 –   A few years back in the annual World Lumberjack Championship, the final competition came down to two lumberjack finalists. Bob was in his 40s and had been a lumberjack all his life. The other lumberjack Alex was half his age – a strapping, young, muscular 24-year old who had been the favorite […]

Evaluate implications of preference-based scheduling before implementation.

August 10 – An issue plaguing workforce schedulers is whether employee preferences should drive schedule definitions or whether the service requirement is the primary driver. When experiencing high staff turnover, many call centers will do whatever it takes to keep their staff happy, including pick of schedules. But beware! Giving all employees their first pick […]

Communicating for successful workforce management.

  August 3 –  At a recent workforce management conference in Sydney, Australia hosted by Call Design, Melissa Fairleigh of Allianz Australia presented a session entitled “Communication: The Key To Success.” This was a great session focused on how to help the workforce management team explore the ways we communicate with other groups in the […]

Tips for measuring the accuracy of forecasted to actual call volume.

July 27 – One of the most common measures of the WFM team is forecast accuracy. But there are lots of variables and options that should be taken into consideration when measuring this statistic.  Here are a couple of things that need to be taken into account: Forecasting Horizon – Whether it is 18 months, […]

Weekly versus monthly plans: weekly wins!

July 20 –  Many plans, usually those generated by finance, are developed with the finest level of hiring, volume, and shrinkage detail as monthly. But we all know that these decisions are best developed knowing the intra-month patterns. Blending an average month together will lead to shortages some weeks and overages other weeks, simply because […]

Empower your agents to minimize your intraday staffing issues.

July 13 – As any workforce administrator knows, managing agent schedules is one of the most time-consuming and difficult tasks associated with contact center operations. Forecasters develop schedules in advance, but the reality is that despite best efforts in forecasting, there will invariably be intraday staffing variances due to unanticipated changes in call volume and […]

Presenting one plan is a disservice.

July 6 –  A concept that we all can buy into is this: more analyses is always better. Given the variable nature of planning, it is always better to do several analyses up front in order to try to capture the risk associated with each one of our planning assumptions. For example, given all of […]

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