Optimize your contact center with workforce management (WFM) software
Create stronger internal processes, focused teams, and sustainable performance levels with workforce management software like RingCX.
Written by Andy Watson
Senior Manager, Product Marketing
Reviewed by John Finch
VP, Product Marketing, AI Customer Experience
Updated: 7 October 2024
Providing customers with outstanding service and products is par for the course when running a successful business. But for a business to maintain success, it’s also vital that the owners effectively manage their most important asset—their employees.
Succeeding in the business world requires a dedicated team that’s focused on common goals. The best way to create a team like this and develop sustainable workforce performance levels, is to ensure the use of optimum workforce management processes. Our quick workforce management reference guide will tell you everything you need to know.
What is workforce management (WFM)?
Workforce management refers to a set of internal processes necessary to create and retain an optimally efficient workforce. It covers all the functions and activities a productive workforce needs, including but not limited to the following.
- Human resource management (HRM)
- Talent management
- Field service management
- Labor management
- Leave management
- Workforce planning
- Workforce analytics
What does a workforce manager do?
A workforce manager oversees a company's productivity at the individual, departmental, and organizational levels. As such, they make sure that an efficient workforce management system is in place.
How does workforce management work?
What is workforce management in a contact center?
Contact center workforce management aims to assign the right number of agents with the right skill sets at the right time. You want the best possible fit between the amount of work required and the number of workers scheduled. This approach ensures that your business can consistently deliver excellent customer service.
Workforce management process
Forecasting involves predicting your future workload so you can determine your labor requirements. To make an accurate forecast, you have to consider demand signals like historical data, weather, special events, and equipment failure. For example, during a promo, a company might experience a surge in inbound call volumes.
With an accurate forecast of future call demands, you can define the shifts and hours that would be known as the agents’ official work schedule. Your employee scheduling software should be able to consider each agent’s skills, contracted work rules, and calendar items to help you optimize schedules based on customer interaction patterns.
Assign the right number of agents to appropriate shifts to meet operational needs. With our previous example of a promo, the company may respond to an increase in inbound call volume by scheduling more agents with specific product knowledge to handle inbound interactions. That will ensure the right numbers of staff to manage the elevated workload throughout the promo period.
A contact center is a fast-paced environment, and anything can happen at any time. Your goal is to anticipate changes (for example, due to absenteeism, sudden spikes in call volume, and so on) and to be able to re-forecast targets to ensure service levels are being met and agents are doing their assigned tasks.
Training your workers is key to the success of your contact center. However, it may get complicated if you have to take them away from their tasks, specifically when there’s a spike in inbound calls. You need your agents at their desk helping your customers.
So when is the right time to train your agents without negatively impacting your contact center performance? A workforce management program will help you find the optimum time for training and other meetings with your agents.
Goals of workforce management
Broadly, workforce management seeks to make contact centers as efficient as possible. It’s about building a sleeker workforce and getting ahead of the competition.
Of course, every organization has different individual properties. That’s why workforce management should always begin with clear planning. What inefficiencies exist in the day-to-day operations of your business? How can contact center staff be reallocated to address these issues?
Clearly defined objectives enable successful workforce management.
Why is workforce management important?
The importance of workforce management becomes clear when you consider the fact that it enables effective forecasting, scheduling, and staffing, as well as making adjustments in real time. Just as critical is having access to the right WFM software and WFM tools to automate your processes.
Top reasons for adding a workforce management process
Good time-tracking software allows you to accurately track time and attendance data, which is an obvious benefit of WFM software. But as you will learn, the benefits of WFM systems don’t end there.
We’ve already mentioned this, but let’s be a bit more specific—a happy workforce is crucial. A happy workforce is a productive workforce, making it the most significant business advantage.
As a workforce manager, you need engaged employees who put in nothing less than their best effort to accomplish their assigned tasks. Automated WFM systems give your employee engagement efforts a big push by helping you properly schedule agents.
Make your staff even happier by giving them more flexibility with their shifts while maintaining the efficiency of your contact center. This is something they’ll surely appreciate.
Understaffing stops you from efficiently responding to customer interactions, while overstaffing makes for idle time and underutilized agents. None of these will happen with proper scheduling. Instead, you’ll be able to maximize your employees’ individual contributions, and balance productivity and payroll costs.
Fact: Employees don’t come cheap. It doesn’t take a human capital management expert to know that the total sum of employees’ salaries, including overtime and indirect compensation, makes up a huge chunk of a company’s operational costs. That makes WFM crucial to reducing expenses.
Here are a few other areas where you can minimize costs with WFM.
- Administrative costs: Submit payroll in minutes without having to fix timesheet inaccuracies or work on error-prone clerical tasks
- Unplanned overtime: Eliminate unnecessary overtime hours by planning for the correct number of agents
- Time theft: Reduce fraudulent hours with an online time clock (RingCentral integrates well with different WFM solutions, time clocks included)
- Labor law violations: Quality workforce management systems provide oversight and complete employee records to guarantee compliance
- Wage and hour miscalculations: A workforce management solution avoids errors in time and pay calculations and ensures pay rules are correctly implemented
With access to more insights, context, and workforce management tools, the workforce manager will be able to make informed decisions. They’ll also be less likely to make incorrect judgments (think about functional requirements like staffing).
They’ll respond to fluctuating project demand levels without sacrificing quality, reallocate human resources when necessary, and enforce ways to improve customer satisfaction or promote corporate social responsibility.
Incomplete spreadsheets, agent turnover, filing discrepancies—there was a time when issues like these made it hard for businesses to optimize their workforce management processes. That’s mainly because they were doing manual paperwork or using disconnected systems to record and analyze operational data.
With industry-leading workforce management solutions like the one offered by RingCentral, you can easily track and analyze data. Your managers will be able to compare your actual contact center performance against your budget and, when necessary, make process adjustments.
These days, businesses often have remote employees—something old WFM systems may not be able to effectively handle. Go for a workforce management solution that has the flexibility to accommodate a global workforce.
Challenges associated with workforce management
Traditional workforce management presents some challenges to employers. These barriers will become more significant as your organization grows. Listed below are some of the biggest arguments for investing in a workforce management solution.
Represented employees
Employees represented by a union often receive higher wages and other benefits. Meeting these requirements can be difficult. Different rules apply to staff based on different factors, such as seniority, pay entitlements, and tenure at your organization.
Staying on top of these different requirements manually can be a challenge. There’s a risk that staff will not receive their entitlement, which can lead to further issues. Workforce management software can help you navigate these complexities. You can automate payment and other benefits to make sure staff receive the correct amounts.
Time tracking
Without an integrated system, time tracking can be an error-prone process. Some time-tracking solutions lack data quality, and thus provide inaccurate time tracking information. This creates a variety of problems.
If employee hours are recorded incorrectly, they risk not being paid for their work. This leads to discontent and frustration within your workforce. What’s more, errors can be costly and time-consuming to correct.
A workforce management system provides visibility and accuracy. Collecting data at the source, such as via a mobile app, ensures high-quality data.
Compliance with labor laws
Legal compliance is a top priority for all organizations. However, keeping up-to-date with changing labor laws can be challenging. This is especially true if you operate contact centers in multiple jurisdictions with differing legislation.
Within the United States, each state has distinct legal frameworks for employers. What applies in state A, may not apply in state B. You’ll need to be mindful of the law in each state in which you operate. Any breaches of law can be costly both monetarily and reputationally.
Effective workforce management solutions cut out the legwork and help you to operate in a compliant way.
Maintaining smooth communication
In a large-scale organization, with many departments, teams, and employees communication can quickly become a challenge. This is largely because there is no centralized method of communication. Employees switch between email, text messaging, and conferencing apps.
Due to this, there’s a risk that communication between contact center teams might become siloed. This could damage the quality of your customer service.
Workforce management solutions create a centralized space for communication. This connects all employees throughout an organization. Information can be exchanged easily, and everyone is kept in the loop.
How to choose workforce management software
The easiest way to solve the challenge of workforce management is with the right software. But finding the best solution for your needs will take some preparation. Make sure you follow the steps listed below when choosing your software.
Always plan
Before choosing software, carry out a thorough assessment of your existing workforce management processes. List all your current workforce management procedures.
Next, think about your current weaknesses. In which areas of workforce management are you underperforming? It's a good idea to contact stakeholders and team leaders to better understand inefficiencies.
To manage your effectiveness, it's useful to measure the performance of processes against key performance indicators. A contact center might measure the following areas.
- Agent utilization - Measures the amount of time agents spend dealing with customers compared to time spent idle. Efficient workforce management should ensure effective agent utilization.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) – Looks at how happy customers are with your service. With your workforce firing on all cylinders, CSAT should be high.
Finally, compile a list of all the improvements you want to make. This will help you understand the different features you need. Compare potential solutions against this list as you consider them.
Consider core functions
While we can’t talk about the specific needs of your business, we can talk about important core functions for workplace management software. Consider whether a solution contains the following essential features.
- Innovative features – Modern workforce management solutions are equipped with artificial intelligence. This enables them to predict future workloads so you can more effectively manage your workforce.
- Time tracking capabilities – A solution should enable you to easily track time, anticipate absenteeism, and make sure that employees are accurately paid.
- Intraday management options – In the hectic contact center environment, you need to be prepared for any eventuality, such as staff illness or sudden spikes in call volumes. If a disruption does happen, software should support you to create new performance targets.
- Support with compliance – Compliance is a big part of workplace management. Software should help you track compliance, and let you know when you’re falling short.
- Help with budgeting – A contact center must balance staffing needs with profit. Software should be able to create demand forecasts to help your business deploy agents in a cost-efficient way.
Opt for comprehensive support
Switching to new software can be a learning curve for you and your team. While the right solution should be user-friendly, you’ll naturally get stuck from time to time. Equally, although the right solution should make these instances minimal, any downtime can be frustrating.
During such times, it's essential that you have easy access to outstanding customer services. Prioritize solutions that offer around-the-clock support, and choose providers that offer maximum convenience. So as well as phone support, make sure there’s also live chat or social media messaging.
Lastly, consider how many people use a platform. The best workforce management solutions have a community of users. Has a provider created space so its wider community can ask questions?
What is the best workforce management software for contact centers?
Here’s something you probably didn’t expect—just as the best HR software or workforce manager may not exist, you’d probably have a tough time looking for the best workforce management software.
You may be able to find one with the most comprehensive set of tools and features, but if you’re not going to use all of them, you’re wasting money. It’s about having the right workforce management software. That one solution that best addresses your specific needs and contact center challenges, such as the following.
- Absenteeism: Unsatisfied workers tend to feel overly stressed or burned out and start to look for excuses to skip work
- High turnover rate: Poor employee experiences may ultimately force people to leave an organization
- Time and attendance tracking: Paper-based tracking is open to discrepancies and employee dishonesty compared to advanced reporting and analytics
- Dwindling budget: High staffing costs, failure to recognize savings in technological investments, and falsely allocating resources—just to name a few ways your funds can quickly diminish
- Lack of open communication with management: Agents may feel that managers are in an unreachable bubble of their own
Tackling these challenges won’t be easy, but as you may have noticed, all of them can be addressed by a solid WFM strategy. With streamlined processes, clear objectives, and the right technology, you can effectively manage your workforce to ensure optimal performance and generate happy customer stories.
What does the future hold for workforce management?
As modern technology continues to change the workplace, approaches to workforce management must evolve. One of the most obvious areas of change relates to regulation. A wide variety of new data laws are scheduled to arrive in the United States.
This means contact centers will likely attract more attention regarding how they collect, manage, and maintain workforce data. Without clear oversight, the task of workforce management will become even more difficult.
Alongside a more regulated workforce, managing increasingly dispersed employees will also likely become a challenge. As many as 22% of US workers now work from home, and this number is likely to grow significantly. This provides an opportunity for contact centers. You can gain access to worldwide talent and build a global team.
However, it also presents a challenge. With so many employees working off-site, management can be difficult. There’s a greater risk of teams becoming siloed, as information becomes harder to exchange.
Lastly, we’re likely to see the continuing rise of artificial intelligence. Contact centers are already embracing AI, and with machine learning-powered chatbots, we can relieve pressure on agents. As the technology develops we’ll see improved call scoring, greater customer insights, and more use of virtual agents.
To transition to an AI-powered future, employers need the correct infrastructure. Outdated legacy systems will quickly become cumbersome and inefficient.
The best way to prepare for all these changes is to invest in workforce management solutions. It’s the answer to clear oversight and communication, tracking compliance, and embracing AI.
Discover how RingCX can help your business today
Now you know the difference an intuitive workforce management solution can make to your business. It’s time to find out how adding RingCentral RingCX to your tech stack will improve your business’s workforce management and create effortless experiences for both your employees and your customers.
Start a product tour to see first-hand how our solution can benefit your business.
Improve your workforce management process with RingCentral today
Do you need more than just workforce management software? Check out what other solutions RingCentral has to offer.
Workforce management FAQs
Workforce management tools provide a complete overview of all employee processes. This can involve a variety of tasks, from time tracking to automating a variety of manual processes.
Workforce management tools also provide unique insights into your employee base. This includes detailed workplace analytics and reports. The best modern tools are built using artificial intelligence. This means that they can provide predictive analytics and project future workforce trends.
Modern workforce management solutions are cloud-based. This means there is no hassle of installing and maintaining physical infrastructure. Cloud-based solutions run entirely on an internet connection.
Workforce management facilitates smooth and efficient day-to-day business operations. Workforce management software can support these functions in many different ways.
For example, thanks to increased oversight, employers can deploy their workforce more efficiently. For contact centers, this might involve ensuring appropriate staffing during busy periods.
Contact centers also deploy workforce management software for its predictive analytics features (a tool can forecast periods of high staff sick leave or customer demand). With the right software, it’s easier to prepare for sudden changes in activity.
Another major workforce management software function is time tracking. Tools can track agent activity to a high degree of accuracy. This ensures that staff are paid correctly for the hours they work. Tracking can also be used to monitor agent efficiency.
Lastly, a contact center might use management software to track compliance. Tools can monitor business processes and provide alerts for potential infringements of legislation. This helps to minimize the risk of fines and reputational damage from a failure to comply.