Workforce Management Featured Article
The Challenges of Workforce Management and How To Triumph Over Them
Workforce management is, as the name implies, the task of handling staff. Of course, the task is not as simple as it suggests, mostly because it’s all about employee maintenance, improving employee productivity, communication and recruitment. It’s how managers run a tight ship, and in order to overcome the challenges of workforce management, the right tools have to be utilized.
Among the challenges managers face when it comes to keeping staff organized are precise staff prediction, especially in the call center because of call volume and agent workload, which when balanced, does not waste resources. Scheduling, adherence tracking and exception handling follow behind, as these items can make or break a seamless contact center experience, both for the employee and the customers calling in.
Monet Software, a provider of workforce management solutions, says that a workforce management solution can mitigate the challenges that just naturally come with handling a group of employees.
Workforce management processes are time-consuming and often fragmented. These processes include tracking employee hours worked and calculating pay earned, assessing staff availability and qualifications for scheduling, generating and distributing schedules, managing FMLA and other employee entitlements and handling travel requests and expense reports. If these processes are handled manually, they are often prone to error with costly results such as correcting overpayments, understaffing of critical jobs, and poor customer service.
Because contact centers are staffed with many agents, most around the clock, it becomes a difficult task to hone in on one particular area or issue without some sort of tool or management solution to keep everything flowing and seamless.
In the end, it’s best to give up the spreadsheet and use a workforce management solution that offers different forecasting methods, eliminating the need of a calculator, spreadsheet and time.
Irrespective of the size of the contact center, workforce management is a challenge. By implementing a workforce management system, an organization can yield a substantial cost-savings opportunity. Workforce management solutions have proven to reduce costs, increase revenue, optimize business processes, improve employee satisfaction, and reduce turnover. These solutions provide an integrated, automated way to bring together silos of data, people, and processes for improved management.
Edited by Ashley Caputo
