Why Digital Challenges Long-Held Assumptions about Workforce Management

This blog is the second in a series on digital channel management. In the first installment, we talked about how the proliferation of digital channels is changing the customer journey – and how businesses are adapting. 

Customer experience on digital channels is in the spotlight, with companies investing heavily in digital. As customers increasingly adopt digital channels to reach out to the businesses they frequent, though, the nature of those channels themselves is challenging long-standing assumptions about the workforce management (WFM) process. 

Traditionally, WFM involves a series of ongoing steps that follow a particular order:

This process assumes a sequential flow of work and that the work stream is contiguous.  Consider, for example, the case of an employee who is talking to one customer on the phone while other customers are on hold waiting for help. When the employee wraps up the call with the first customer, he starts talking to the next customer in line. It’s a straightforward, linear process. It’s clear when the call began and ended, and how long the employee spent resolving the customer’s issue. 

With digital channels, however, it’s not quite so simple. Channels like SMS, chat and social media are better understood as a series of transactions where the interactions may not necessarily be sequential or contiguous. In the digital world, employees may begin a customer interaction with one customer and have that interaction interrupted by a higher priority interaction with another customer. They may be interacting with multiple customers simultaneously. There are often also delays between responses to digital interactions -- the customer could be waiting on a response from the agent, or vice versa. Lastly, some interactions may change modes of communication or escalate – for example, when the back-and-forth involved in a chat exchange prompts the agent to move the conversation to the phone for quicker resolution. 

This noncontiguous, nonsequential workflow complicates the traditional WFM process, including:

• Data: Determining the appropriate AHT can be difficult depending upon whether you look at interactions in terms of total duration or in focus.
• Staffing: These different interpretations of AHT can have a significant impact on requirements calculations and various objectives (e.g., service level, speed of answer and speed of response).
• Scheduling: After you develop your staffing requirements, then you move into a schedule optimization phase where you try to match your employees to your business need. You could be dozens of people over what you think would be the ideal number or dozens of people under, and it all depends on how you choose to calculate AHT.
• Change management: And then once that's done, you enter into a change management phase where you're monitoring the need to change schedules and forecasts. 

That’s just a quick glimpse into how digital channels are changing everything we thought we knew about workforce management. WFM processes in a digital world are very much intertwined, and they require a different approach to overcoming the new challenges digital channels have introduced.  We’ll go more into depth about those challenges – and the tools you can use to mitigate them – in our next blog in the series.