For years, many contact centers have been planning and forecasting in intervals of 15 or 30 minutes, depending on the business’ unique characteristics, historical interaction patterns, and evolving call volume trends. A business with average handle times (AHT) of 10 minutes, for example, may find that a 15-minute interval is ideal, while one with slightly longer AHT may find that using a 30-minute interval results in much more accurate requirements calculations.
Today, however, contact centers are realizing that digital channels have changed the nature of work. With increased usage of digital channels for customer service, interactions can now take hours or days. Contact centers increasingly leverage bots to handle the simpler, more routine inquiries, leaving more complex, time-consuming interactions to agents. In addition, digital channels like email or chat often have long breaks between responses, increasing the elapsed time between when the contact begins and when it ends.
Waiting until a contact ends before seeing any information about the contact makes it impossible to plan work effectively across planning intervals. Consider the following examples at one company, Globe Inc., which operates in 15-minute intervals.
- Email: An agent, Joseph, completes an email at 3:57 p.m., and the contact is reported as completed. The reported handling time cannot exceed 15 minutes based on current workforce management (WFM) standards, so the 12 minutes of time Joseph spent handling the email is the only data point transmitted to the company’s WFM solution. This fails to account for the 48 total minutes spent on the email by three other employees before Joseph jumped in to handle the interaction. The proper way to account for this would be to continue reflecting the contact as completed during the 3:45 to 4 p.m. interval, but Globe needs a way to reflect the time spent working on the contact outside of that interval.
- Social media: A customer posts to Globe’s Facebook page at 2:20 p.m. Sally is the first agent to respond on behalf of the company; she spends 8 minutes crafting a response before posting to Facebook at 2:37 p.m. The customer replies to Sally’s post at 3:13 p.m., and another agent, Gabriel, works on a response for 6 minutes before posting it at 3:32 p.m. The customer responds with one final question at 4:12 p.m., and a third agent, Nicola, spends 7 minutes drafting a response before posting it at 4:47 p.m. Due to antiquated data reporting, Globe only accounts for 15 minutes of handling time during the 4:45 to 5 p.m. interval, and it only recognizes the person that handled the contact in that ending interval—in this instance, Nicola. The source system tried to send a 21-minute handling time, but Globe’s WFM solution rounded it down to the interval length of 15 minutes; the actual handle time, however, was 21 minutes across three people over six intervals.
As these examples illustrate, traditional WFM applications have two major shortcomings: work items that span multiple planning intervals are treated as a single work item that occurs in a single interval, and asynchronous work is treated the same as synchronous work. Both shortcomings lead to planning and scheduling inaccuracy.
WFM is centered around having the right people at the right time, but if you are not accounting for all of the time spent working on contacts, how can you trust your projections? To plan and forecast effectively in this new digital world will require leaders to retrain their brains on how they think about data reporting. Instead of waiting until a contact ends, they need to start reporting when activity occurs—when the first agent takes action on the email or Facebook post—and report when a contact becomes active again. By decomposing these conversations into something that's usable for WFM purposes at the lowest granularity the organization needs (e.g., 15 or 30 minutes), the contact center can create forecasts, staffing requirements, and schedules driven by patterns of interval-specific activity rather than case counts and the interval in which a contact ends.
The nature of work has changed, and businesses need a WFM solution that breaks the chains of traditional WFM paradigms to stay competitive. Learn more about how NICE WFM is helping contact centers plan and forecast more accurately given the new characteristics of customer service interactions in an increasingly digital world.
