NICE WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT

Transcription

1 NICE WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT Benchmark Study Report

2 INTRODUCTION Welcome to the NICE Systems Workforce Management benchmark report! As workforce management professionals, our success depends on knowing our environment. Of course, it s easy to become overly focused on our own day-to-day, so it s important to grab opportunities to rise above the noise and see what s happening around us. Our intention is that this report is one such opportunity to highlight the issues impacting your peers, and the trends shaping your work. CONTENTS Executive Summary...3 Survey Methodology...4 Participants...4 Study Findings Balancing operational efficiency and employee engagement...5 i. Scheduling for success...7 ii. Allowing for the unexpected Trends and innovations...8 i. Mobile...8 ii. Cloud...9 Conclusion

3 HOW DOES YOUR WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT STACK UP? EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The workforce management (WFM) market has been around for decades and there s an assumption that it s highly mature, even static. Of course for WFM professionals looking at it from the inside out, there is constant change and innovation new capabilities and creative solutions applied to better help the business meet its objectives. This study represents a snapshot of what your peers are doing to a) address their key challenges, and b) pursue growth and innovation. Correspondingly, we ve organized our findings into two high-level themes. 1. Balancing operational efficiency and employee engagement Lowering costs while increasing customer satisfaction. This is the primary tension with which your peers are grappling a service operation oxymoron. Lowering costs and improving customer satisfaction are supposed to be at odds. And yet, some organizations are finding new and different ways to move both needles at the same time. How? The one prerequisite to lowering costs and improving customer satisfaction engaged employees. 91% of respondents said employee engagement was somewhat important or very important to meeting company objectives. But knowing what is needed has yet to consistently produce action just 58% of respondents acknowledged that their company has an employee engagement initiative. Even that feels optimistic; in a broader study (beyond WFM), Bain & Company found that only 25% of leaders had a defined plan to engage employees. 3

4 What are your peers doing right? They are finding more ways to engage their employees in scheduling. 56% are using schedule bidding, another 37% are using preference-based scheduling, and 17% plan on giving their employees access to a rules-driven, design my own schedule, solution in the next 12 to 24 months. Ready for a fresh mantra for a new era of WFM Professionals? Engage employees to lower costs AND increase customer satisfaction AT THE SAME TIME. 2. Trends and innovation WFM professionals are clearly hungry for new ideas and innovations, but our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. Case in point is cloud. Many respondents cited cloud as the most compelling innovation in WFM, but only 14% of respondents have plans to migrate their on-premise solution to the cloud over the next 24 months. The dichotomy was similar for mobile. There was clear appetite for more mobile access and applications, but 89% of responding companies have fewer than 1 in 5 remote workers. In one breath we want to be mobile-enabled, and in the next open comment field we ask Why would anyone need to access their schedule outside of the workplace? When there s this kind of fuzziness, there s also an opportunity to strike out and lead. The most forward-leaning organizations will be among the first to leap to the cloud and to enable a mobile workforce. This is where your operation can eat the competition s lunch and (to connect the dots) better attract and retain engaged employees. SURVEY METHODOLOGY The goal of our Benchmark Study was to understand pain points, trends, and best practices in workforce management. We sent a survey invitation to individuals with Workforce Management in their title/area of responsibility. This included a mix of NICE customers and non-customers. Our invitations were sent on 2/14/2014 and the survey closed on 2/28/14. Individuals who completed the survey were offered advanced access to the report. PARTICIPANTS Participants from over 250 companies submitted responses, representing a wide range of organizations; 67% of respondents were from Customer Service, while Technical Support and Sales comprised smaller segments. Company sizes spanned a spectrum from less than 500 (27%) to more than 5,000 (also 27%). PARTICIPANTS OPERATION SIZE 15% 16% 5,000 or more % 2,000-4, % 1,000-1,999 Less than 100 6% 14% 4

5 Most participants had an on-premise WFM solution and came from organizations where a majority of employees worked on site. TYPE OF WFM DEPLOYMENT PERCENTAGE OF REMOTE EMPLOYEES 80% 60% 68% 60% 45% 47% 42% 40% 30% 20% 0% 17% 13% 1% On-premise SaaS Hosted Other 15% 0% 9% 0% 1-20% 21-50% 2% 50% or more STUDY FINDINGS When we crafted this research study, we wanted to understand where the bar was set for WFM programs, and what actions professionals were taking to raise that bar. We can summarize our findings according to two central ideas. 1. Balancing operational efficiency and employee engagement Our questions explored forecasting, scheduling, change management and other current practices. Then we pushed into desired innovations. Whether we were exploring the present or the future, there was one common theme across responses employee engagement. WFM professionals realize that employee engagement is a key driver to meeting company goals. 91% of respondents described employee engagement as somewhat important or very important to meeting company objectives. However, just 58% of respondents acknowledged their organization had an initiative to address employee satisfaction. These results are even a little more optimistic than third-party research. Bain & Company asked leaders across functions about employee engagement; 90% stated it was a top priority, but only 25% admitted they had a formal plan to better engage employees. IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT TO MEETING COMPANY OBJECTIVES 31% 60% Very Important Somewhat Important Somewhat Unimportant Not At All Important 5% 3% 1% Neither Important nor Unimportant 5

6 INITIATIVES CURRENTLY BEING PURSUED BY COMPANIES 34% 10% 75% 58% 71% 64% 2% 13% Green reduce energy footprint Vendor Consolidation reduce vendor count Cost reduce operating cost Employee Satisfaction reduce turnover Improved Service at same or lower cost Improved Quality better insight into interaction Other All Listed Why is engagement a growing area of focus? Organizations, like people, tend to take an if it s not broke, don t fix it approach to business. In their 2012 Employee Engagement Index, Gallup found that 70% of service workers are disengaged. Each of those workers costs the organization as much as 46% of their pay in lost productivity. Employees with low engagement are four times more likely to quit their job than their highly engaged peers. And 88% of engaged employees feel empowered to solve customer problems (vs. 17% of disengaged employees). Employee engagement is broken and organizations that want to BOTH reduce costs and improve customer experience have one prerequisite engaged employees. Now, in contrast to Gallup s 70% disengaged number, just 11% of our respondents admitted their employees were largely disengaged. Depending on your interpretation, that can mean that WFM professionals are (a) fortunate to have well above-average results, (b) optimistic understating the issue, or (c) disconnected from the reality of engagement levels in their organization. PERCEIVED LEVEL OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT 1% 10% 15% 58% 16% Not At All Engaged Somewhat Disengaged Neither Engaged Nor Disengaged Somewhat Engaged Very Engaged Addressing and improving employee satisfaction doesn t have to be a choice between retention and efficiency. The survey results surfaced a few tensions between existing practices and best practices that will help increase employee engagement without sacrificing operational efficiency. 6

7 i. Scheduling for success When employees are assigned schedules and performance goals without active participation, they lack accountability. Our customers and our survey respondents agree command-and-control communication is by far the biggest source of employee unhappiness in a service organization. As a resolution, 31% of organizations use bidding as their sole approach to scheduling. The risk is that schedules locked in by a bidding system often sacrifice some multi-skill or multi-channel optimization in order to obey employee bids. You may have happier employees (and higher retention), but the wrong employees scheduled at the wrong times (unhappy customers and missed SLAs). About 20% of respondents are using a hybrid approach to scheduling, one that factors in employee preferences and employee skills. Preference-based scheduling, where an employee selects a certain amount of available hours, puts the power back in the employee s hands. Does an employee prefer graveyard shifts or Saturday mornings? Do they have a Wednesday night bowling league they simply won t miss, in exchange for working Friday nights? With this system the employee creates a schedule that meets both personal and staffing needs. ii. Allowing for the unexpected The (in)frequency at which most organizations generate new schedules 66% revise schedules once a quarter or less makes it necessary, regardless of scheduling methodology, to use a WFM solution that facilitates schedule trades and time-off management. FREQUENCY OF REVISING SCHEDULES AND BIDS 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 2% More than once per week 21% 17% 17% 9% 9% Once per week Once per month 26% Once per quarter Once per year Never Other Organizations understand the value of WFM systems that facilitate the ease of editing and adjusting schedules. This capability was scored as the most important when evaluating a solution s scheduling functionality. One best practice here is to automate responses to employee requests. In our experience, schedule trade and change requests can pile up in the WFM professional s inbox; or, they can be handled automatically by the WFM solution. WFM professionals need to define the rule set for approving / denying requests, and then let the technology immediately respond to employees. This helps employees find the right colleague for a swap, or the right day/time for vacation. It also frees the WFM professional to focus on higher value activities. As a result, both groups are more engaged. 7

8 IMPORTANCE OF SCHEDULING CAPABILITIES MEAN Schedule optimally across multiple sites? Optimize use of employees multiple skills? Apply multiple scheduling methodologies? Account for employee performance in schedule creation? Include employee performance in schedule assignment? Automate approvals of schedule change and time-off requests? QUESTION Facilitate ease of editing and adjusting schedules? Analyze and report on schedule accuracy? Provide employees with self-service tools to manage their schedules? 2. Trends and innovations In our research, we specifically asked which innovations had captured the hearts and minds of WFM professionals. We wanted to know what was influencing their agendas, and what specifically would change their day-to-day routines. While there were some clever one-off ideas, two broad technology trends were set forth as defining the evolving WFM landscape. 8 i. Mobile Only a few years ago, many WFM professionals might have seen a mobile solution as an unnecessary and possibly dangerous addition to their system. In the past, we heard feedback regarding a number of concerns: How would time spent accessing a mobile app be logged? Why do employees need access to their schedule when they aren t at work? Now mobile is not only considered a nice to have, it s quickly becoming a must have. Different systems provide mobile functionality in a number of ways. Whether it s a smartphone app, or a browser-based solution that can be accessed via a mobile device, employees need to be able to access their schedules, request time off, and manage PTO without a call or an . More than half (53%) of the organizations we surveyed had some type of work-at-home program or remote options for employees. Mobile access to manage schedules empowers employees and cuts costs for call centers. Mobile also promotes collaboration between teams and keeps supervisors informed throughout the day. Accessing WFM via a mobile device gives professionals and supervisors transparency into operations for example, 43% of respondents were monitoring adherence in (or near) real-time. Or, they can send out a quick poll to their team from their mobile device asking the cause of unexpected call volume.

9 ii. Cloud When asked about the most interesting innovation in WFM in the past 12 to 24 months, our participants most often cited Cloud technology. Yet, when asked about their timeframe to move to the cloud, we saw something different just 1 in 4 respondents will have a WFM solution in the cloud two years from now. Everyone s talking about it, but few call centers are taking the leap. What s the hold up? The historical immaturity of cloud-based solutions is a possible cause. In the past, WFM providers with cloud-based solutions were generally smaller, niche providers. They didn t support the full functionality and scalability of enterprise software. The trade off required between functionality and flexibility was a sacrifice that didn t make sense for large organizations with complex business requirements. Or perhaps organizations don t understand the business case for cloud. Often the total 3-year investment for a cloud-based solution is a bigger number than on-premise. But it s shifting cost no more hardware, operating systems, maintenance, facilities, and more. In our experience, a move to the cloud can reduce total cost of WFM solution ownership by as much as 40%. RESPONSES TIMEFRAME ORGANIZATIONS WILL MOVE TO CLOUD Already use hosted / cloud-based WFM system Less than 6 months 6-12 months months No plans to move to a hosted / cloud solution 4% 4% 6% 11% 75% 0% 40% 80% It s time for organizations to re-evaluate their timeline for moving WFM to the cloud. Enterprise solutions are now cloud-ready (and plenty of customers have already blazed the trail). The business case for cloud is becoming more accepted across organizations. Benefits of cloud-based solutions positively impact not only the WFM program, but also IT and Finance. Organizations moving to the cloud see clear competitive advantages, particularly in mitigated risk through guaranteed system uptime, and the shift of costs from capital to operating expenses. TOP BENEFITS OF MOVING TO THE CLOUD MEAN Reduced time to deployment Shift of costs from capital to operating expenses Ability to add / remove licenses month-to-month Guaranteed system uptime One best practice we ve seen in early adopters is a strong collaboration between WFM professionals and their IT department in building a business case for migrating to the cloud. That s because it s the IT department that often reaps the direct benefits of a cloud migration. It s important to view a move to the Cloud as a partnership: (1) IT saves the time and cost of maintaining and monitoring a server-based solution, (2) WFM professionals gain the flexibility and efficiency of adding and removing licenses month-to-month with the knowledge that their solution will be live when they need it. 9

10 CONCLUSION Remember our new mantra? Engage employees to lower cost AND increase customer satisfaction AT THE SAME TIME. Employee engagement is no longer a fluffy concept pushed by Human Resources. It s a real competitive differentiator; a way to attract, develop and retain top talent. That requires companies to take better advantage of scheduling methodologies that empower employees to express preferences, trade shifts and define availability. WFM solutions that automate these processes and ensure requirements are still met helps supervisors and administrators spend less time sifting through their inboxes and more time responding to critical business issues. By embracing processes and solutions that empower employees, you ll find that lowering costs and increasing customer satisfaction isn t an oxymoron anymore. In fact, it s the only way to beat the competition in a service-driven, customer-is-king economy. For those of you with an eye on innovation, mobile and cloud are the two biggest technology trends making waves amongst your peers. As more organizations embrace remote employees, mobile access to time management and schedule change capabilities is a must. Mobile keeps employees connected to peers and priorities while promoting collaboration between supervisors and their teams. And, while interest in cloud is emerging, you can adopt early and start reaping cost and flexibility advantages now. Get ahead of the pack by partnering with IT to define a mutually beneficial business case. Faced with so many opportunities for change, the real question now is: How does your WFM program stack up? LOWER COSTS ENGAGED EMPLOYEES MOBILE CLOUD CONTACT Americas, North America T F EMEA, Europe & Middle East T F Asia Pacific, Singapore Office T F The full list of NICE marks are the trademarks or registered trademarks of Nice Systems Ltd. For the full list of NICE trademarks, visit All other marks used are the property of their respective proprietors.