Workforce management

In customer service, staffing is the biggest lever you have. Too few people on shift means customers wait; too many means paid idle time. Workforce management, WFM for short, keeps both situations rare.

#A cycle in four steps

WFM is not a plan drawn up once a year. It is a cycle that repeats week by week and interval by interval.

1. Forecasting: how many contacts arrive per channel, skill and quarter hour? History and known events are the basis.
2. Scheduling: demand becomes shifts that respect the service level target, working-time rules and what agents would like.
3. Intraday steering: adherence shows where plan and reality drift apart while there is still time to react.
4. Development: quality evaluations, coaching and learning modules improve what the next plan depends on.

#Why the cycle matters

Each step feeds the next. A forecast that ignores events produces schedules that collapse on Monday morning. A schedule nobody can keep makes the best forecast worthless.

Only the feedback from the working day closes the loop: deviations flow back into the next forecast and the next round of scheduling.

Weekly schedule

CoverageService level ✓

MonTueWedThuFriSatSun

Early

Late

Flex

Shift swap

Thursday late for Friday early

Approve

#Agents as participants

Modern WFM does not plan over people's heads. Agents see their shifts on their phones, enter preferences and swap shifts through a swap board, within the rules planning has set.

That takes load off planners and makes schedules more reliable. People who can shape their shifts are more likely to keep them.

#WFM in Univerx

Univerx Workforce runs the whole cycle on one platform: forecasting, scheduling with a swap board, what-if capacity planning and self-service for agents.

For a practical start, read the guide Workforce planning in the contact centre: the basics. How holidays and campaigns enter the plan is the subject of Forecasting with events.