Workforce Management: It s more than just software Troy Plott Product Manager Interactive Intelligence
Table of Contents Introduction... 3 Configuration... 3 Day classifications... 3 Weekly shift definition... 4 Agent constraints... 4 Number of weeks of ACD history... 5 Shrinkage factor... 6 Forecasting and scheduling... 6 ACD data review and volume forecasting... 6 Scheduling... 7 Intraday management... 8 Intraday monitoring with reforecasting... 8 Schedule adherence... 8 Schedule adherence goals... 8 Real-Time adherence... 9 The cost of poor adherence... 9 Conclusion... 10 Copyright 2006-2011 Interactive Intelligence, Inc. All rights reserved. Brand and product names referred to in this document are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 7601 Interactive Way Indianapolis, Indiana 46278 Telephone/Fax (317) 872-3000 www.inin.com Rev. 6.10, version 1 Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 2 Workforce Management: It s more than just software
Introduction Workforce Management is more than just software. It requires a large amount of process definition and organizational consideration. One common mistake that contact centers leaders often make is an investment in workforce management software without fully evaluating how they will use it along with the processes and best practices that support it. These considerations are critical to the success of any workforce management program, and without evaluating these items, it is highly probable that you will invest in workforce management technology and receive no return on your investment. Some examples of these other considerations for a successful workforce management deployment include how your ACD is configured, what type of forecasting best matches your business, what type of scheduling practices you will use and goals for the various metrics including schedule adherence. This document is designed to be a companion document to the Interaction Optimizer Feature Overview which covers the main components of the software piece of the process. For a copy of the feature overview document, please contact your partner, sales representative or refer to the Interaction Optimizer page under Product Information on the Support site at my.inin.com. Configuration Day classifications The Day Classifications feature is an often underutilized component within the configuration setting for Interaction Optimizer. At its most basic, it is used to identify and track the various days of the week (i.e. Monday vs. Tuesday, etc.) but it has two other important uses. First, Day Classifications can be used to identify anomalies in your history that you would like to remove during the forecasting process so that those days don t skew future forecasts. You can establish a specific Day Classification for things like marketing campaigns or email drops, and use that classification to identify and remove those days from the forecasting process. The second type of use for Day Classifications is when you want to identify specific days/patterns for use in a future forecasts. This can be done with some of the same ones used in removing days (i.e. marketing campaign, email drop, etc.), but in this case, you can utilize all of the previously classified days for that specific event as the basis for your future forecast. These uses can be especially helpful in minimizing the amount of time necessary to analyze and adjust the forecast if maintained correctly. I will address the forecasting process and the pros and cons of doing data management vs. forecast adjustments later in this document. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 3 Workforce Management: It s more than just software
Weekly shift definition Weekly Shift Definitions are used to define the weekly work rules around how agent schedules will be built including things like the minimum and maximum hours per week/day, breaks, meals and the days of the week to which these rules apply. Shifts should be defined based on a general set of scheduling rules or restrictions that can be applied to a group of agents that have similar schedule availability. While Shift Definitions can be assigned to individual agents, you should not establish a Shift Definition for every agent in the system. There are several reasons why this is a bad practice, including the negative impact this can have on schedule efficiency, the amount of manual work that will be required to maintain them over time, and the impact it may have on the scheduling engine as a whole. The impact on schedule efficiency is one of the largest reasons to avoid this practice. If you create individual shift definitions for each agent and separate restrictions for each shift definition, you will significantly reduce the schedule efficiency of the schedule generation. This defeats the point of workforce management programs, which is to optimize the schedules based on customer patterns to ensure that you have the least number of people staffed necessary to meet your service level objectives. Beyond the impact to schedule efficiency, you would also need to maintain all of those individual shift definitions manually every time you have any changes to the scheduling rules for each agent. This can be an administrative nightmare and end up costing you additional money for the FTEs that support the product. Last but not least, the practice of setting up individual shift definitions for each agent greatly increases the number of schedule possibilities and can greatly impact the schedule generation process. The ideal configuration is typically one with somewhat general Shift Definitions that most of your agents are assigned to and a limited number of individual Agent Constraints to address truly one-off schedule definitions for individual agents. Agent constraints The Agent Constraints feature allows users to apply an additional set of scheduling rules on top of those already included in the Weekly Shift Definition at the individual agent level. Agent Constraints are treated as additional scheduling rules that are applied to the schedule generation process, so it is critical that they be configured to match the overall constraints within the Shift Definition. When the work rules between Shift Definitions and Agent Constraints are in conflict, the schedule can fail to generate so it is important that users evaluate both the Shift Definition and Agent Constraints as a whole when using a combination of both. For example, if the Shift Definition is constrained to start between 8am and 10am, and you also establish an Agent Constraint that requires the agent to start between 6am and 7:30am, the schedule generation for that agent will fail. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 4 Workforce Management: It s more than just software
When used correctly, Agent Constraints can be helpful in automating some of the otherwise manual individual schedule changes that may be outside of the normal Shift Definition. One common example is medically approved schedule limits that restrict either hours and/or days an agent can be available. You can assign the agent to a general Shift Definition and then apply an Agent Constraint to address the medical restriction. Agent Constraints can also be used for recurring weekly activities such as meetings or doctor s appointments on a specific day for a specific agent. It is important to remember that while the use of constraints can be a great way to apply the individual agent restrictions to the generic Shift Definition, you should not establish individual agent constraints for every agent in the system. The impact on schedule efficiency is one of the largest reasons to avoid this practice. If you create individual Agent Constraints for each agent, you can significantly reduce the schedule efficiency of the schedule generation. This defeats the point of workforce management programs which is to optimize the schedules based on customer patterns to ensure that you have the least number of people staffed necessary to meet your service level objectives. Beyond the impact to schedule efficiency, you would also need to maintain all of those individual Agent Constraints manually every time you have any changes to the scheduling rules for each agent. This can be an administrative nightmare and end up costing you additional money for the FTE s that support the product. Last but not least, the practice of setting up individual Agent Constraints for each agent greatly increases the number of schedule possibilities and can greatly impact the schedule generation process. The ideal configuration is typically one with somewhat general Shift Definitions that most of your agents are assigned to and a limited number of individual Agent Constraints to address truly one-off schedule definitions for individual agents. Number of weeks of ACD history The Number of Weeks of ACD History setting allows users to establish a default for the number of weeks of history that are automatically included in the forecasting process. One common question that comes up is, What should we select for our contact center? Unfortunately, there isn t one answer to that question that would work for all contact centers. It is important to do the necessary analytics to determine the right number of weeks as the default based on your individual business. For example, if your business is fairly consistent, you may be able to use a larger number of weeks compared to a more sporadic environment that would require fewer in order to achieve an accurate forecast. This feature automates the data selection piece of the forecasting process, and when coupled with analytics around the number of weeks and the Day Classification feature, users can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes them to review, edit, and publish new forecasts and schedules. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 5 Workforce Management: It s more than just software
In addition to being able to configure that setting, users can also edit the number of weeks they wish to use during the forecasting process as necessary. Even with great analytics and the ideal default setting, you will still need to edit these from time to time when planning for an abnormal week that your default amount of ACD history may not accurately represent. Shrinkage factor The Shrinkage Factor setting allows users to include an amount of unplanned shrinkage in the upcoming forecast and schedule generation. While most people think of absences as the best example of unplanned shrinkage, this factor should also include any unplanned events or activities in addition to absences. This is an area that many of our customers miss when implementing Interaction Optimizer. For example, if you have a large number of unplanned meetings, you would need to include that time in your shrinkage factor in order to account for it in the planning cycle. Ideally, a vast majority of your shrinkage should be pre-planned, including vacations, meetings, training, and other events. One common misconception in many contact centers with high amounts of unplanned shrinkage is that pre-planning isn t possible because their environment is different. While this may be true in small portion of the industry, in most cases, you can improve the amount of preplanned shrinkage through the use of proper procedures for preplanning shrinkage and good leadership. As a goal, you should pre-plan at least 90% of your offline activities for meetings, training, etc. and only have a small percentage of unplanned shrinkage outside of absences. Measuring and managing with shrinkage is a critical piece to the overall workforce management process. If you need additional information on how to measure or manage with shrinkage, including setting goals for shrinkage, please refer to the Measuring and Managing Shrinkage practical guide that is available at www.inin.com in the Interactive Resource Center. Forecasting and scheduling ACD data review and volume forecasting One of the first steps in the forecasting and scheduling process is the completion of a data review to determine how accurate or valuable your most recent data will be in predicting the future. This typically involves some sort of normalization process of the data you plan to use. There are two different schools of thought on how to best prepare for this process; data management within the WFM software and data management outside of your WFM software. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 6 Workforce Management: It s more than just software
Managing the data review process using your WFM software is the process of reviewing your actual data on a regular basis before you generate a new forecast. The main point of this process is to determine if each day s data is a good representation of a normal day, therefore, something you would use in a future forecast. As discussed earlier, the Day Classification feature within Interaction Optimizer can be used to expedite this process and allows users to tag bad data days for easier identification and removal from the forecast. This process should be done on a daily or weekly basis to ensure that the most current impacts are identified. Contact centers that do a good job of reviewing and classifying data ahead of time enjoy the benefit of less work during the forecasting process to make edits. Managing the data review outside of your WFM software typically involves doing all of the analysis in either Microsoft Excel or Access and then making a large number of changes to the forecast within Interaction Optimizer to match the results of your analysis prior to schedule generation. The benefit of this process is that you get to skip the Day Classification and ACD Data Review step of the process within Interaction Optimizer. The down side is that you will still need to do that same level of analysis and classification outside of the system in order to ensure an accurate forecast. While at first this may sound like a bad idea, some organizations find this process easier than managing the process within the WFM software given the specific types of data they use for their forecasting process. Some organizations not only maintain their data review process outside of the system, they also do their entire volume forecast outside the system. This is not a standard practice but in some highly complex and analytic organizations, this can be a good option. One common example is contact centers that utilize advanced forms of quantitative and qualitative forecasting (i.e. regression analysis, etc.) to build their forecast. In these environments, you can skip the Day Classification, ACD Data Review and Volume forecasting steps and import your Headcount Forecast directly into Interaction Optimizer as long as you utilize the appropriate supported TSV format required for importing forecasts. Interaction Optimizer also supports imports for the Headcount Forecast in addition to the Volume Forecast for users that wish to use the system solely for schedule generation based on an established forecast. Scheduling Schedule generation and assignment is the next step in the workforce management process. Interaction Optimizer supports two main methodologies today including skillbased scheduling and Agent Preferences. To get more information on these two methods/features, please reference the Interaction Optimizer Feature Overview. For a copy of the feature overview document, please contact your partner, sales representative or refer to the Interaction Optimizer page under Product Information on the Support site at my.inin.com. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 7 Workforce Management: It s more than just software
Intraday management Intraday monitoring with reforecasting Once all of the forecasting, scheduling and planning is complete, intraday management is the last critical step of the workforce management process. Interaction Optimizer has several features that are designed to assist users with this critical piece of the process, including Intraday Monitoring with Reforecast same-day schedule administration with analytics and Real-Time Adherence. In this section, I will be addressing the Schedule Adherence component of the process but to get more information on the other intraday management features, please reference the Interaction Optimizer Feature Overview. For a copy of the feature overview document, please contact your partner, sales representative or refer to the Interaction Optimizer page under Product Information on the Support site at my.inin.com. Schedule adherence Schedule adherence goals One of the hardest and most important parts of rolling out schedule adherence as a metric and a culture in your contact center is selecting the right schedule adherence goal. When selecting a goal, you need to choose one that both employees and leadership teams will understand and support. That can be a really tough thing to do when your employees say things like "I don't think adherence is a fair metric. It forces me to rush the customer off of the phone when it s time for my break or lunch." Setting the goal too high can impact customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Setting the goal too low can erode all of the efficiency gains you have worked so hard to achieve during the workforce management process. What is a call center leader to do? Start by figuring out the total number of minutes that your average agent is scheduled in the office. For the traditional FTE that works 40 hours per week with a 5x8 schedule and a 30 minute lunch, that number is 510 minutes per day (8.5 hour schedule x 60 minutes.) Next, the hard part; figuring out how many minutes out of adherence you should allow to achieve the balance of efficiency and customer satisfaction you are looking for. There are two ways to get to this information. One is to use the reporting from your telecom and workforce management systems. If the reports don't provide the level of detail you need, you can also use general assumptions. For the purposes of this example, I am going to use general assumptions. The next key metric you need is the number of minutes per day/week/month your agent is genuinely stuck on calls serving customers when they should be at break or lunch. Let s assume that our agents miss an entire break every day (15 minutes), and that they also miss the start of their lunch by another 10 minutes so that s a total of 25 minutes out of adherence every day. If that happens every day, every week, all month long, the agent will achieve 95% schedule adherence. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 8 Workforce Management: It s more than just software
To some, 95% may sound like a pretty tough goal but think about the math. If your agents are consistently performing at 95% adherence, that means that they are actually out of adherence a little over 2 hours each week and a whopping total of 8.5 hours each month. Essentially, if you set a schedule adherence goal of 95%, you are giving your agents a whole day every month to be out of adherence for free. Average handling time (AHT) can also be a consideration when trying to determine how many minutes your agents are actually stuck on calls when their break/lunch occurs. Contact types that have extremely long AHTs have a greater chance of impacting an agents entire break/lunch. Technical support contact types where the agent is troubleshooting a problem for the customer and could be on a call for 35-45 minutes are a great example. If you have contact types like that, you should assume that the frequency of going late or missing a break/lunch entirely will happen more often. Generally speaking, adherence goals should be somewhere in the 90-95% range in most contact centers including those with long AHTs. If you are currently using a goal of less than 90%, you may want to re-evaluate that goal as you may be giving away a little too much each day/week/month and not getting the full benefit of your workforce management process. Real-Time adherence The Real-Time Adherence feature within Interaction Optimizer provides great visibility into an agents schedule adherence, and, in much of the contact center industry, Real Time Adherence is a must-have standard feature rather than an optional feature. To get more information on the Real-Time Adherence feature, please reference the Interaction Optimizer Feature Overview. For a copy of the feature overview document, please contact your partner, sales representative or refer to the Interaction Optimizer page under Product Information on the Support site at my.inin.com. The cost of poor adherence Why is schedule adherence so important? Frankly, poor adherence is something that can cost your contact center a lot of money if you don t manage it. Penny Reynolds from the Call Center School provides a great example in her book Call Center Staffing: The Complete, Practical Guide to Workforce Management. In Penny s example, assuming that a contact center loses only 20 minutes per agent per day (only 4% of an 8-hour shift,) the financial losses add up to substantial amounts of money. Call Center Size (by agents) Cost of Lost Time $12/ hour wage rate Cost of Lost Time $18/ hour wage rate 50 $ 52,000 $ 78,000 100 104,000 156,000 200 208,000 312,000 300 312,000 468,000 Calculation: 20 minutes per day x 5 days per week x 52 weeks/60 = annual lost hours Annual lost hours x fully loaded wage rate x number of agents = cost of lost time Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 9 Workforce Management: It s more than just software
Reynolds states that a contact center can classify the costs of lost time as hard-dollar costs if the time is classified as shrinkage. Once classified as shrinkage, additional staff must be factored in to a contact center s forecasting and scheduling plan to offset the impact and lost productivity from poor adherence. If contact centers don t classify poor adherence as shrinkage, there isn t any additional cost for additional staff but with fewer available agents to handle the workload, customers will experience longer wait times and service levels will suffer. Conclusion It is critical to the success of any workforce management program to remember that workforce management is much more than just software. It requires an investment in analytics, a large amount of process definition and leadership to ensure that you realize the full benefit of the program. I have had the opportunity to assess many contact centers over the course of my career, and the one common complaint I have found is contact centers that implement a workforce management program but claim that they aren t getting the benefit they expected from it or that it simply just doesn t work in their environment. After some research, I always find that they actually haven t implemented the appropriate processes and best practices that support the overall success of workforce management. If you are considering implementing Interaction Optimizer or already have and find that you aren t getting the full benefit of the program, stop and take a look at these other factors mentioned above. Remember, It s more than just software. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 10 Workforce Management: It s more than just software