Workforce Optimisation – an increasingly smart choice for today’s economic climate

CCF’s Nicolette Allen interviewed Michael Andrews, WFO Practice Leader at contact centre services specialist, Sabio, www.sabio.co.uk to learn more about the importance of effective Workforce Optimisation during tougher economic conditions.

Given the pressures that businesses currently face, why should organisations think about investing in Workforce Optimisation today?

Businesses today are looking for clear benefits and demonstrable ROI and payback within months of their initial investment. Fortunately Workforce Optimisation, and Workforce Management (WFM) specifically delivers against both these criteria, and is proving a critical differentiator for businesses of all sizes that are looking to optimise the performance of their most expensive contact centre asset – their people.

Across a range of projects, we’ve seen compelling metrics – including a 50-seat implementation that delivered an ROI for WFM within four months from the overtime saving alone, though to a major 1,000 agent plus WFM solution for Sky that delivered an ROI in eight months and has produced savings of over £1,000,000 a year for the five years since going live.

Our experience shows that effective WFM deployments can consistently deliver productivity savings of between 5 and 15 percent across most contact centre environments – while also helping to increase the consistency of service delivery and support agent multi-skilling. WFM is of course just one part of the Workforce Optimisation toolset – add on functionality such as Quality Monitoring, Customer Feedback, Performance Management, and the returns can be even greater. Businesses should be turning this question around, asking themselves instead whether they can afford to ignore tools such as WFM given today’s market conditions.

What are the benefits of a more integrated WFO approach?

We’ve found that where businesses operate separate WFM, Quality Monitoring, Training, Interaction Recording and Performance Management functions, there is a lot of needless administrative duplication and key contact centre staff have to spend too much of their valuable time manually integrating the output from all these different tools.

Adopting a more integrated WFO approach helps to address this, but you ideally need to have expertise from across all the different WFO components, as well as integration, implementation and business expertise, to really drive through an integrated WFO approach. Immediate benefits can include removing much of non value-added administrative activities that tend to monopolise so much contact centre management time, including sorting out holidays, handling shift swaps and agent sickness, as well as reporting and exception management.

Those organisations that adopt a more incremental approach to Workforce Optimisation typically end up with the most successful implementations. In addition to the WFM productivity savings outlined earlier, businesses can take advantage of call time reductions and improved sales conversion rates by deploying Training and Quality Monitoring solutions; Customer Feedback techniques can deliver improved market intelligence and encourage loyalty, while Performance Management solutions can help drive the right kind of behaviour throughout the contact centre.

Does Workforce Optimisation have implications for parts of the business outside of the contact centre?

We’re increasingly working with organisations that are looking to extend the kind of benefits that Workforce Optimisation delivers in the contact centre across other parts of their business. For example, by tightening schedule adherence across its contact centre and back-office operations, one major utility business has unlocked the equivalent of more than 10 FTE’s worth of additional capacity simply through enabling better overall time management.

As the credit crunch continues to bite, we’re going to see these and other proven WFO tools being used to support core back-office support functions such as claims management and revenue collection, for example. We’re also starting to see WFO techniques extend into new areas such as the branch-banking environment, where branch staff optimisation can play a key role in helping banks and building societies manage their costs during these difficult economic times.