Workforce Management: An Essential Yet Often Overlooked Aspect of Customer Experience Departments
Workforce Management (WFM) is a department rarely established when a company initially launches its customer experience department. From a timeline perspective, WFM is a shared service department that typically gets implemented when the customer experience department reaches a size and complexity where operational leaders find it challenging to forecast demand, capacity plan, project financials, and optimize schedules.
From my experience, there are several reasons why operational leaders delay the implementation of WFM teams:
- Lack of Awareness: Many leaders are unaware that an industry like WFM exists. This is understandable as WFM is a niche field.
- Perception of Higher Priorities: Without knowledge of WFM, leaders are often overwhelmed with initial high-priority tasks such as implementing communication platforms, creating processes and workflows for transactions, initial onboarding plans for the first hires, and the first iteration of the organizational structure.
- "Can-Do" Attitude: This commendable attitude sees original operational leaders accomplishing much in the beginning stages of setting up the contact center, leading them to believe they can handle all tasks required to optimize the center.
- Limited Budget or Over-Indexing of Expenses: Sometimes, the leadership team has a limited budget for shared services departments, or they over-index their operating expenses in hiring frontline workers and operational leaders.
These reasons are entirely valid for delaying or neglecting the creation of a WFM team at the genesis of a customer experience department. In fact, until a contact center reaches a certain level of complexity and scale, funding a full-time WFM team may not be necessary.
However, I strongly believe that a leadership team starting a contact center should consider contracting an experienced workforce management professional. This professional can provide guidance on forecasting, capacity planning, and creating optimal schedules from the outset. By obtaining the right advice early on, workforce management can help right-size the contact center and set up a plan for optimally growing the frontline staff as the business scales. Additionally, the WFM professional can help implement a WFM tool, providing leaders with insights into staff productivity, educating frontline leaders on core contact center metrics, and setting targets to improve operational efficiency. Lastly, the WFM professional can offer strategic guidance on how the frontline staff should evolve as the business scales and incorporates additional product lines or customer communication channels.
From my experience, when I join an organization, I often find that these crucial strategical items have either not been completed or have been incorrectly implemented for years. This leads to significant opportunity costs for the contact center, sometimes amounting to millions of dollars in operating expenses. Furthermore, countless hours spent by operational leaders on creating and re-creating optimization plans could have been better spent on coaching and performance managing frontline staff and leaders.
Let's spread the word to all customer success, experience, and service leaders starting or recently started a contact center: find a WFM professional to help optimize from the start, reducing financial and emotional opportunity costs!