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Workforce Planning is the process of analysing, forecasting, and planning workforce supply and demand, including assessing gaps and determining target talent management interventions. This ensures that your organisation has the right people—with the right skills in the right places at the right time—so you can fulfill your strategic objectives and provide the best possible customer experience.
Call centre workforce planning is the process of aligning the strategic and operational elements of a contact centre workforce with organisational objectives. Contact centre workforce planning addresses all elements of the call centre including team scheduling, training, and forecasting.
When it comes to workforce planning in a contact centre, this includes forecasting staffing needs based on anticipated volume or other business drivers (e.g. the rollout of a new product) and then ensuring everything is in place to hire, train, schedule, and manage the required agent team.
What are the benefits of workforce planning?
Workforce planning provides managers with a strategic basis for making resourcing decisions. It allows managers to anticipate change rather than being surprised, as well as providing strategic methods for addressing current and predicted workforce issues.
Contact centre workforce planning helps your organisation to deliver a great customer experience that also improves the effectiveness and efficiency of your call centre workforce.
This includes:
- Personalised experience for your customers – connect with the most appropriate agents
- Workforce Optimisation – efficient use of distributed and varied workforce
- Back-office optimisation to remove siloed customer information to ensure consistency across the entire customer lifecycle
Omnichannel workforce planning
A good omni-channel workforce planning strategy provides real-time and historical insight for more accurate forecasting and scheduling. It also helps ensure that you’re distributing work to the employees who are the most skilled at handling each particular type of interaction across the different channels (voice, email, chat, web, etc.)—so that you can provide the best possible experiences for your customers, each and every time.
Too often, interaction channels are managed in silos, creating complexity and manual work for the planning department. It can be a daunting task at times just getting relevant data from each of your point solutions, let alone trying to make sense of it across channels so you can plan for the future. Developing an accurate forecast and effective workforce schedule in this environment takes too much time and effort. This can be reduced through automation and tight integration with the contact centre routing engine.
Making sure each interaction or work item is handed to the employee who is both available and possesses the most appropriate skills, such as languages spoken, product knowledge, or the ability to handle multiple contact channels—depends upon having up-to-date schedule and skills information stored in the contact routing system database. If the contact centre maintains separate systems for routing and workforce management, and if they don’t talk to each other, the true potential of your workforce can’t be realised.
To achieve that true potential, organisations need a workforce management solution that is integrated with the contact routing system so that routing decisions can be made based on individual employee schedules. This way, the right resource is selected for each task or customer interaction, based on up-to-the-minute schedules and skills information. This not only improves agent adherence, but since the update is automated, operational costs are also reduced by eliminating time-consuming manual updates.
Workforce Planning with Telstra Contact Centre Genesys Cloud takes workforce management capabilities to the next level and helps you deliver on your business objectives.
