Summer 2018 On Target

This year’s SWPP Annual Conference was so fun – three days of binging on workforce management sessions makes us WFMers returning home feeling motivated, re-trained, and happy. I hit as many sessions and vendors as I could, and got some great information.

1. During the My Button Says Less than 200 Agents: Challenges and Benefits of Small Contact Centers session, I heard some interesting ideas:
   1. Jason Hilliard of Radio Systems said they give a 30-minute paid lunch to everyone who has to work on a Saturday.
   2. Tyler McGary of Idaho Central Credit Union said they have a Supervisor WFM Boot Camp (2 hours to 3 days depending on experience level) where their call center supervisors sit with their schedulers, to watch how they generate schedules, plan meetings, and approve time off. He has a full list of items they go through with those supervisors (which I will be hitting him up for later!)
   3. Chad Murray of Logix Federal Credit Union shared his Real-Time Management Reaction Strategy matrix, taking us through (in detail) each service tier qualification, definition, and action needed as service level falls.
2. Todd “Mustang Sally” Gladden explained that Slant Shifts (10 hours on Monday, 9 hours on Tuesday, 8 hours on Wednesday, 7 hours on Thursday, and 6 hours on Friday = 40 hours/week) are beneficial because they are popular, they meet a specific need for more help on Monday’s busiest times, and there’s a third benefit too: they answer the problem of productivity loss that a 4×10 schedule brings with it. That means if you start introducing slant shifts in place of 4-x-10s, you might also see a positive change in AHT, schedule adherence, and utilization.
3. Bob Dobson of StubHub shared a tip with us that is so simple, but still so helpful: When you have data listed in a weekly table, and that needs to be interpolated up to the monthly and quarterly level, they use a 4-4-5 system, which takes 4 weeks from month 1, 4 weeks from month 2, and 5 weeks from month 3 (for a 13-week quarterly total).
4. Instead of using Service Level, Average Speed of Answer, or Abandons as a goal, one company uses Occupancy as their defining KPI. Normally an output, establishing required staff by occupancy allows them to then calculate the projected service level and base that on what makes sense for each specific forecast group.
5. Speaking of abandons as a goal, if you’re using abandonment rate as your KPI, be sure to include average time to abandon in there also.
6. Helpful functions from Excel for WFMers:
   1. INDEX combined with MATCH puts VLOOKUP on steroids. Use this when you need to find more than one criteria.
   2. MROUND is good for time entries, and FLOOR is useful for intervals. Jeremy Black gave everyone a quick tutorial on the spot, and we were all so grateful and taking notes like crazy!
   3. SUMIFS will produce a more elegant (and certainly shorter) solution to nested IF statements
   4. Watch out for typed times versus dragged times – they won’t be identical until you convert them with the TIME function.
7. WFM in Non-Traditional Contact Markets (like back office, or high-paid exempt agents):  “Schedule” is a dirty word, use “Planning” instead. And unless it’s necessary for phone service levels, consider using block-scheduling rules, with open lunch, breaks, and start times. Limit schedule adherence to the weekly conformance metric (if scheduled for 40 hours, did they work 40 hours?) instead of using the interval pace.
8. Some lessons learned from Jeff Bretana’s experience with non-phone contacts at Navy Federal Credit Union:
9. 1. Only offer emails if the inquiry is not urgent; otherwise, that email may be coupled with an impatient phone call, too.
   2. There are challenges with tracking handle times of non-phone work; if the work is interrupted, or put down and picked up later in the afternoon, the span may be artificially inflated. Sometimes you need a time trial study with a stopwatch to get those AHTs (and beware of people behaving differently when they’re being watched).
   3. When a chat isn’t going smoothly, turn that into a phone call instead. True ownership allows the agent to initiate that call, which keeps the customer from having to go through the IVR and start over from scratch.
   4. Don’t expect cannibalization to justify the cost of chat, email, or social media, because it doesn’t always eliminate calls to the extent of there being a cost savings benefit.
10. New Shrinkage Category: the amount of time agents are spending on the phone with IT, or an internal support desk.
11. Deborah Mauk shared a great way to tell the difference in WFMers:  Forecasters are great at math, and Schedulers are Mad Scientists because they have to be willing to just blow everything up!
12. I forgot to mention in my own session, Developing Your Own WFM Staffing Model, there is a run-rate calculator for Service Level and ASA at the bottom of the 2nd worksheet, and that template is still available for download on the SWPP website (not the app).
13. Finally, a big congratulations to John Campbell for winning the Workforce Management Professional of the Year Award, and to Maggie Klenke for the Lifetime Achievement Award!

Hope to see you next year!  Mark your calendar for April 23-25, 2019 at the Omni Nashville Hotel!

Tiffany LaReau, CWPP, is a Workforce Management Consultant with Human Numbers.  This content originally appeared on Contact Center Pipeline’s website at www.contactcenterpipeline.com.