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Workforce management

Centralized or de-centralized WFM: 5 ways to strike the perfect balance

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New business models and organizational change have put the debate over centralized versus decentralized workforce planning back on the table. Kanogo Njuru at Teleopti advocates a balanced approach using Workforce Management (WFM) technology to blend all types of service organizations…

In the past, workforce planning was often managed by local teams out in the field.  However, as technology has progressed to automate many of the traditionally time-consuming forecasting and scheduling processes, more and more organizations have seen the advantages of centralized planning.  Contact centers in particular have enjoyed the benefits technology brings when addressing critical long-term strategic challenges, while optimizing workforce management and end-to-end processes for improved productivity, staff satisfaction, customer service and financial control.  

It is also a trend that is not necessarily limited to the contact center world and the same debate over centralized versus decentralized planning can apply to all sorts of service models for example in retail, cleaning services and hospitality. In all instances the aim is to improve customer and employee satisfaction and boost profitability through optimized, automated forecasting and scheduling.  

Over the years, seismic shifts in business have had a transformational impact on people.  Mergers and acquisitions have brought uncertainty along with fluid internal staff structures while the rise of e-commerce has turned old ways of working on their head.  How do organizations change the corporate culture to adapt to the new world order? How do they find, manage and keep good talent?  How do they bring together thousands of full or part-time employees at head office locations or at remote virtual contact centers around the world and of course take into account home workers?  What is the best way to forecast and schedule effectively?  All these questions have renewed the debate around centralized versus decentralized workforce planning.

Some organizations take a conscious decision not to centralize all their Workforce Management (WFM) processes at once, if at all, regarding it to be counter-productive.  There is the commonly held belief that centralized planning takes power away from local people, leading to a sense of loss of control and a demoralized workforce.  Then, there is the pragmatic approach.  Planners often share a special relationship with their local teams and they truly understand what their staff want and how they work best hence the old saying – if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Other companies may choose to centralize certain functions like payroll but decentralize others such as HR and recruitment.  Whichever WFM model organizations choose to adopt, good communication is essential to overcome mistrust and feelings of fear. By combining a sound communications strategy with technology, a balance between reducing unnecessary costs, while also promoting consistency and higher standards of operations, customer service and workforce satisfaction can be achieved.  

5 ways to strike the perfect balance with WFM

Fortunately, the latest WFM solutions are highly flexible and offer speed and agility to support the needs of today’s multi-channel customer experience (CX) operations and other service organizations.  Being cloud-based, they eliminate the need for expensive hardware and large in-house IT departments, are fast to implement, easy to scale and simple to use.  Let’s take a closer look at five key benefits: 

1.       One single solution – can support a whole network of planners and brings consistency to a variety of centralized and decentralized WFM processes – from forecasting and scheduling enough staff to manage changing customer requirements to keeping track of employee sickness, personal schedules and team preferences.  Even if different planning teams operate in different locations, the deployment of one solution makes it easy to connect the dots, bringing together the various elements involved in successful workforce planning such as staff information, employee requests and forecasting while accelerating the transfer of important workforce data to accommodate specific special projects or marketing campaigns.  What it more, using one WFM platform opens the door to centralized planning in the future and makes the transition a smooth and seamless one. 

2.       High levels of scalability – support both centralized and decentralized workforce planning through agile forecasting and scheduling that adapts to changing customer and business requirements and by helping to create effective skills matrices that identify and deploy the best talent.  The latest WFM solutions can flex up to accommodate a growing network of different planning teams in different locations or they can provide end-to-end visibility and superior management of organization-wide workforce planning activities from a central point. 

3.       Self-service for choice – whether an organization adopts a centralized or decentralized workforce planning model, the addition of self-service empowers employees to  control their working lives, to view their schedules and those of their colleagues, request shift swaps or book time off at the click of the mouse or by using their mobile devices. 

4.       Fairness and transparency through automation – consistency and greater visibility of WFM processes both in smaller, decentralized planning teams and in centralized departments that plan for thousands of staff across the organization is made possible through automation.  Transparency and openness create a sense of fairness that appeals to staff while satisfying organizations with a strong Union or Works Council presence.  Managers have the information they need to ensure all employees take it in turns to do the more unpopular shifts and plan vacation time equitably while employees have total visibility of each other’s schedules and time off through self-service functionality. 

5.       Effective Change Management – certain customers like Germany’s biggest online retailer OTTO, cite the strategic impact that WFM technology has on actively advancing corporate change management programs.  The flexibility, transparency and collaborative nature of today’s WFM technology has helped OTTO to strike a good balance between achieving high productivity levels (1,600 agents working 2 million shifts and 4,500 shift rotations – handling over 24 million enquiries per year!) and transferring the program’s core values of empowerment and fairness into 15 virtual contact centers. What is more, they have achieved this through a mixture of centralized and decentralized workforce planning methods across the company.

Centralized? Decentralized?  Does it really matter? What really matters is striking the balance between operational or business efficiency and promoting a collaborative framework that leads to engaged employees and satisfied customers.

It’s time to welcome WFM technology as the catalyst for change.

Capstone: Building sophisticated systems to provide maximum results…

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Capstone Intelligent Solutions specialise in contact centre optimisation across all channels including managing your workforce. Our solutions are designed to help your contact centres accelerate business impact, deliver consistent outcomes and innovate the customer and agent experience.

The Challenge

The technology sector is fast-paced, with many businesses expanding rapidly. Add to that, the complex nature of many technology companies’ product or service and providing customer support in this sector can be a challenge. The biggest challenge the organisations are facing today within the contact centre world is the transition from your ordinary voice channel to a multichannel/omnichannel environment. Managing the customer experience across multiple channels is a key challenge for contact centre managers, and our recent research flagged just how vital this experience is when it comes to converting customer experience into sales.

Given the number of ways that we use to communicate with one another these days, it’s not all that surprising that we have high expectations when it comes to dealing with companies across multiple channels, be it via instant chat, telephone, email or social media.

The solution

We build and support sophisticated communication systems that deliver results for our clients.  By creating fast and effective communications we increase your customer interaction, productivity and business performance. Capstone Intelligent Solutions acts as your single systems integrator.  We provide physical and virtual client support across three continents, meaning you have direct and local contact with a Capstone engineer at all times.

If you or your organisation are facing any challenges then, please do get in touch for a free consultation with one of our contact centre experts.          

 

Contact Bobby Rampal
e: bobby.rampal@capstoneconnects.com
w: www.capstoneconnects.com
t: +44 7568 108 131 / d: +44 203 727 3343 

Start to nurture future budding customer service professionals, says Teleopti…

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Workforce management consultant at Teleopti UK, Ben Willmott, explains the three simple workforce management strategies to attract the brightest young talent, and keep ahead of the competition. From transforming a contact centre environment to suit the next generation of digitally-led professionals, to introducing gamification by accommodating the trend of constant feedback; following the three strategies outlined will allow your contact centre to thrive with a happy and proactive workforce.

According to current estimates, more than 1.1 million people are employed in UK contact centres and a substantial number are from the younger generation. In just five years’ time, today’s youth will form 50 per cent of the global workforce. What’s more, their career expectations and technical know-how will shape the workplaces of the future, putting new pressures on companies wishing to attract the best young talent to drive business growth and keep one step ahead of the competition.

So what is the secret to becoming the employer of choice for the younger generation and how do you prevent them from straying to the competition? Don’t delay in taking the first step, prepare now. Start by understanding the psychology of today’s up and coming customer service professional. What really makes them tick?

In a nutshell, young people are, in the words of DMG Consulting, “a highly social generation that puts work/life balance ahead of their careers.” They work hard and they play hard. At the same time, they need to be constantly acknowledged, rewarded and engaged in the workplace. They desire – and expect – to be involved in everything from the company mission to the contact centre team and the customers they serve, and they want to make a difference right away.

The next step is to transform your contact centre environment, adapting it to bring out the very best in budding young customer service professionals. Combining a flexible framework with the latest workforce management (WFM) technology is the way to go.

Here are three strategies to get you started:

1. Support flexible working through self-service – people take great pride in what they do but young talent doesn’t function well in a rigid, authoritarian environment. They need to know the rules and what is expected of them but, beyond that, give them a little freedom. The younger generation loves to self-serve so take advantage of self-service technology to add flexibility whilst ensuring contact centre and customer service objectives are met.

Recent innovations in self-service capabilities allow agents to access their schedules through web-based portals such as MyTime portal in Teleopti. There, agents trade shifts, pick up unexpected shifts just freed up, voice their preferences for overtime and request time off. Having a say in schedule preferences gives them a sense of empowerment and offers them a better work-life balance.

2. Engage and empower – make the most of mobility – take a look around you – when do you ever see a young person without some sort of mobile device? Mobility is here to stay. Be prepared for youthful employees using multiple apps, working from more than one device and working in various locations. Rather than fight it, ensure you exploit mobility to help your young agents flourish.

3. Introduce gamification – the new generation’s need for constant feedback has driven the development of the gamification sector. The latest WFM technology incorporates gamification features that motivate employees, encourage healthy competition and reward individual and team performance in a fun environment. Use gamification to: a. create an online social community that increases collaboration, provides access to knowledge bases, gives agents a forum to share learning and top tips, ask their more mature colleagues for advice and communicate major achievements to give that all-round feel-good factor young people crave.

b. utilise dashboards to provide a real-time snapshot of employee and team performance against specific contact centre KPIs or customer SLAs.

c. Make star employees shine! Recognise exceptional performance by awarding points and badges for measurable metrics such as average handling times and first contact resolution successes.

Understand what makes the customer service professionals of tomorrow tick. Follow these three simple steps and your contact centre will be rewarded with a workforce that will want to stay with you, confident they have a well thought-out career path and the ability to make a real difference.

 

To find out more about Teleopti UK, click here

italk’s ‘proactive’ approach to workforce management…

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Staff motivation and retention seem to be recurring challenges that a majority of call centres are faced with. This is why, at telecommunications company, italk, we have invested considerable time and energy in perfecting our sales technique and ensuring our managers really get the most out of their workforce.

 

What does getting the most out of employees mean to us?

We train our staff to focus on the right kind of sales, rather than stress over impossible targets. We incentivise and support the team and, crucially, show how instrumental they are to the success of the company. As a result, we have high retention rates and a rapidly growing business model; this was highlighted earlier in the year when we were named Vodafone’s Fixed Partner of the Year.

Based on our successful and long-standing methodology, we share our top tips for getting the most out of your workforce:

 

Focus on training

We put a lot of impetus on creating a bespoke training programme for all new hires, primarily focusing on the product and the ‘italk sales technique’. Rather than rushing the training process, we spend several days in the classroom environment to ensure all agents feel completely comfortable and confident before they go out onto the sales floor.

We work closely with all new hires to try and eliminate fear, which we have found to be a huge barrier for success when selling over the phone. Once our agents have passed the training process, we then monitor them closely to quickly identify any possible issues; working with each individual on a case-by-case basis and providing more bespoke training when required.

As managers, our role often involves offering moral support, and we encourage a feeling of inclusivity across teams with more experienced members of staff helping to train and mentor new hires from the offset.

 

Promote positivity

The techniques our agents use focuses on value rather than the hard sell approach, and works within a positive framework. We aim to only sell our product to those who really need it, targeting the benefits our clients will gain from switching to our services which are usually cost-led.

We encourage our agents strike up engaging conversations with prospective customers, to spend the time required to understand their needs, as we believe this not only delivers a better service overall, but helps our employees to feel valued; in turn boosting motivation and job satisfaction.

 

Be real

For us, adopting a realistic approach has led to an open dialogue across the workforce, as many of whom have been used to a call centre environment dictated by high sales figures and a lack of genuine communication when it comes to career prospects.

We don’t want to flog or force our products, and our sales targets reflect this expectation. As a result, we have a very high staff retention rate and our agents are actually selling more. Customers tend to respond better to genuine conversations rather than scripted sales spiel.

 

Recruit internally

Furthermore, our high retention rate is also linked to our policy of hiring internally. Giving our employees the opportunity to move up within the company provides a clear vision and a drive to succeed.

Most of our managers — including our managing director — started out on the phones, and this visible progression helps to motivate staff members and showcase how hard work is greatly valued. We have created an environment with almost endless opportunities for progression in the sales team and beyond, and it’s an exciting prospect for everyone involved.

 

Get your employees involved in the brand

The first thing we do with new hires is get them invested in the italk brand. We’ve found that in order for people to do an exceptional job; they really need to believe in the product and the benefit it provides to customers.

A focus on high-quality marketing and our new website — which launched a few months ago — helps to instil pride and continue our passion for creating a brand with real personality.

 

To find out more about italk, click here

EvaluAgent: Unhappy call centre workers costing UK economy £2.3 billion…

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Partnering with ContactBabel and basing its research on the UK Contact Centre HR & Operational Benchmarking Report, the provider of workforce management software, EvaluAgent, has calculated that unhappy call centre employees are costing the UK economy an estimated £2.3 billion every year.

Managing director at EvaluAgent, Jaime Scott, said: “A major challenge faced by many is delivering a great experience to customers that are more demanding and vocal than ever. As the call centre continues to play an increasingly important role in the customer experience, customer service leaders need to invest not only in CX technology but also in technology that engages, motivates and empowers the humans behind the technology.”

Read more on the research here