The Goldilocks Principle in WFM: Managing Change and Intraday Operations

Nick Martin at NICE CXone explains the Goldilocks principle in CXone WFM, and managing change and intraday operations

Very little is constant in the ever-changing contact centre environment. While schedules are prepared weeks or months in advance, all it takes is a major outage, severe weather or even an unanticipated marketing promotion to upset the balance between customer demand and the number of employees scheduled to work at any given time.

That’s where workforce management (WFM) solutions come in. Just as organizations need just the right mix of WFM features to support the growing business and employee needs, they also need to be able to adjust the number of employees scheduled as customer demand fluctuates.

Too many employees leads to overstaffing, while too few can cause service levels to suffer. Just as Goldilocks was in search of the perfect chair, porridge and bed in the classic children’s story, contact centres need a WFM solution that’s just right: not too complex, not too simple, but perfectly tailored to support their growing needs.

But when a business is expanding and evolving, many spreadsheet-based, homegrown WFM solutions fall short in two critical areas: change management and intraday.

More business means more employees. And more employees translates into greater challenges when it comes to managing schedules on the fly – even more so when you add in multi-skilled agents and the complexities associated with managing asynchronous interactions.

WFM teams can plan a schedule that looks great on paper, but the reality is that life happens; people call in sick, request vacation, or ask to trade a schedule – a day may look very different than initially planned.

And, of course, markets are fluid; changes within the business or in customer demand can have a significant impact on contact volumes within a given day from the time originally scheduled.

The need is simple: just the right amount of tools to monitor, automate, and optimize. Here’s how the right WFM rises to the challenge:

Monitoring Tools for Real-Time Insights

A WFM provides dashboard-style reporting for real-time adherence, intraday management, and adherence and conformance.

The WFM does the heavy lifting of aggregating, analyzing, and centralizing data, so teams can spend less time determining what their adherence and agent activity is and more time making critical decisions about the effects of those metrics.

Intraday Manager for Real-Time Visibility

Unlike spreadsheets, the WFM’s Intraday Manager offers a visualized view into issues, for example high variances and severity levels such as variances with forecasts for AHT, volume, and open states for agents.

Automated Approval Rules

A WFM simplifies change management with automated approval rules for agent requests. You can empower employees to manage their schedules while ensuring that business needs are met—without burdening your workforce management team with manual schedule approvals.

AI-Powered Lunch and Break Optimization

A WFM harnesses AI to tackle one of the most challenging aspects of scheduling—lunch and break optimization. You can balance staff levels, optimize based on agent skills, and identify areas for improvement, all in an intuitive, user-friendly interface.

Just as Goldilocks needed a bed that was just right—neither too soft nor too hard—growing businesses need a WFM solution that’s just right.

Our WFM offers just the right amount of functionality to address the challenges of intraday management, without adding to the administrative burden, to help your growing business optimize performance as you scale.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of NICE CXone – View the Original Article

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NICE CXone combines best-in-class Omnichannel Routing, Workforce Engagement, Analytics, Automation and Artificial Intelligence on an Open Cloud Foundation.

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Author: NICE CXone