A guide to Workforce Management for BPO/KPO/ITES industry

Introduction:
The call center business involves juggling of job, people, and time at a rapid pace round the clock to ensure the end customer receives the highest service satisfaction. The Workforce Management Systems manage the critical aspects of this business in an integrated way keeping an eye on the bottom line of the business. The implementation of Workforce Management System directly improves:

1. Operational Efficiency
2. Reduction of labor costs
3. Timeline Adherence
4. Effective Overtime Management
Call Center Challenges:

The Call center is a customer facing interface of an organization. While every company tries to put the best foot in front, the dynamic nature of the customer service often throws a call center into poor performance, high attrition and low customer satisfaction that results in loss of business in the long term.
Workforce Management System software is designed to help call center companies achieve the maximum productivity. The three critical elements of a call center business are people, job and the time. The Workforce Management Systems assist Call centers to use these three resources optimally. It brings in a formula that systematically ensures the workload is distributed & delivered in right time, to rightly skilled people. An organization can achieve a top of the stack status with the implementation of a right Workforce Management System.
In most cases, organizations work with standalone systems. For, e.g., an organization may have a good Human Resource System with specific modules dedicated to resource planning, customer work management, and people skill records. However, such systems often operate as independent islands & are essentially utilized for record keeping. Many a mid-size contact centers continue to use Excel to schedule workforce for the tasks available and as the workload dimension grows such systems fail to keep up with work targets defying the business objectives. In the following sections let’s look at the 2 important benefits of implementing Workforce Management system.

Forecast
Workforce managers in every organization face the challenge of bringing the best match of quality and timely delivery against labor costs. In a competitive environment of today, poor forecasting can lead to erroneous scheduling affecting the business bottom line dramatically. It is easy to imagine if the frequency of inbound calls, outbound calls, web chats, emails surpasses the required number of rightly skilled agents. Then the organization pays the price in the form of reduced service levels, low customer satisfaction, and poor agent commitment. A Workforce Management System mitigates this risk of poor forecasting by providing accurate insights through robust reporting

Staff Scheduling
The Workforce Management System empowers an organization to forecast the work received from the client. Once the work is received, the organization needs to schedule the right skilled staff to perform those particular tasks and deliver to the satisfaction of the customer, on time. It is a vital part of matchmaking work. However, ever-changing shift patterns, Flexi time and attritions make it impossible to handle the task of staff scheduling manually.