USA - English German - Deutsch Arabic - عربي Spanish Korean - 한국어 Australia - English New Zealand - English Singapore - English
Request a demo

What Is The Job Description Of A Workforce Management Call Center?

The Role of Workforce Management in Call Centers

What Is The Job Description Of A Workforce Management Call Center

What You Need to Know About Workforce Management in Call Centers

A well-managed workforce in a call center could positively affect the well-being of your employees and productivity, which results in higher satisfaction with their work and lower the rate of turnover.

Additionally the fact that your employees are precisely where and when they’re supposed to be at the time your customers require them results in more content and happy customers.

In an environment of omnichannel contact centers where a lot of interactions take place simultaneously, it may be difficult to forecast the need and make use of the capabilities of your agents.

Controlling your call center’s staff effectively is vital to ensure both your customers and agents are happy. This process is quite complicated when you take into consideration your employees their skills and breaks, as well as the various channels that you offer support and peak hours.

In this article we’ll help you understand what is the job description of a workforce management call center and the reasons it’s so important. We’ll also provide some practical strategies that will help you develop your workplace management strategy.

Table of Contents

The Job Description Of A Workforce Management Call Center

What Is The Job Description Of A Workforce Management Call Center?

What Is The Job Description Of A Workforce Management Call Center? The description of the job of the position of Workforce Management (WFM) in the call center includes the planning and forecasting of employees to ensure the highest coverage possible for managing call volume. The primary responsibilities are analyzing call patterns, observing real-time staffing levels, changing schedules and reporting on the performance of staff to increase efficiency and reach service objectives. The WFM team is able to balance the demands of their work, decrease wait times and increase efficiency while meeting customer service objectives.

 

What is workforce management for call centers?

Workforce management (WFM) is an approach to staffing in call centers that is based on a set of procedures to ensure that the correct number of employees with the required skills are employed at the appropriate moment. WFM is a successful model that focuses on optimizing the structure of the team without risking the revenue potential, causing the discontent of employees, or causing the impression of discontent from customers.

Key features of call center workforce management

Each business has their own take on the management of workforce in call centers. However, there are some key elements that each WFM strategy must have.

Staff forecasting and scheduling

Businesses must make sure they have the appropriate number of employees at the right time in order to increase productivity and budgets. Seasonality, trends in the customer and business demands and many other factors can make scheduling difficult and lead to periods of overstaffing or understaffing. By utilizing call centers' workforce management businesses can ensure efficient scheduling and precise labor forecasting by using the historical data to develop schedules for the future. This advantage is enhanced when using other useful call center platforms such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) software.

Time and attendance tracking

The tracking of time and attendance reflects the amount of time spent at work, the productivity of employees, and scheduled absences. An accurate tracking process - like ensuring employees are accurately recording their hours and activities throughout the day can help in maximizing payroll budgets and reduce operational expenses, and reducing an organization's bottom line. In conjunction with other processes that increase efficiency, such as scripts for call centers help employees in becoming most productive.

Real-time team management

The latest workforce management tools are able to give organizations real-time insights into the state that its workers are in. This way managers are able to check on their employees throughout the day and see what they do in their free time. This is a procedure that could lead to opportunities for development and training. In addition, real-time management of teams could be beneficial in the event that demand for services unexpectedly increases during the day, which allows managers to distribute staff as and when it is needed.

Reporting and analytics

Analytics and data reporting improve business operations. By using call centre WFM reports, supervisors are able to analyze the performance of employees and company metrics and integrate this information with other data sources such as software for call centers. The business can make use of this information to make many decisions regarding organizational matters like scheduling, training as well as intraday management and future planning of operations.

Benefits of Call Center Workforce Management

There are numerous benefits of efficient workforce management for the call center. By implementing staff management, you will:

  • Exceed Your Customers’ Expectations
    If your workforce isn’t properly managing your workforce properly, meeting customer’s expectations is nearly impossible. Let’s face it: people these days and times want greater customer service than they ever have. Time is an important factor for customers; they will not overlook a long wait time. Utilizing your resources more efficiently by utilizing workforce management can enable you to improve service levels and ensure your customers are happy by providing quick solutions from staff who can comprehend their issues.
Benefits of Call Center Workforce Management
  • Optimize Agent Scheduling
    The call centers which have adopted hybrid or completely remote working environments might be more difficult to adjust their schedules for agents appropriately. If a call center is one where all agents are physically on the floor, managers can glance around and alter the schedules of agents to avoid overstaffing or understaffing. Workforce management, when accompanied by the appropriate software tools, assists call center managers in adjusting agent schedules so that they are in line with their desired service levels as well as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) no matter the location where their agents work.  

  • Make Your Employees Happier
    Management of your workforce has a positive effect on your agents’ health and satisfaction at work. Incorrect staffing levels causes your employees to exhaust themselves quickly, which may reduce their productivity and, even more importantly, cause them to leave their jobs more quickly. Through the management of your workforce, you’ll be better able to anticipate demand accurately and know the number of agents the contact center requires to handle the volume of calls. In addition, your employees will not be required to perform over their capabilities, thereby helping to keep them on the job for a longer period of time. The expense in hiring, onboarding and training a new agent could severely impact your business’s financial situation when you have a low turnover rate. Additionally, your company will get a bad name and deter top quality agents from applying for jobs.

  • Maximize Your ROI
    The management of your workforce can boost the revenue of your contact center by ensuring that your staff are accessible at the right moment. A well-planned resource allocation can cut down on waiting times and rate of churn to ensure you’re never missing a customer sales or support call. In addition, managing your workforce helps determine the number of agents you’ll need. Human resources comprise around two-thirds of the contact center’s budget. If there isn’t the management of your workforce, staffing over (and spending too much) is more likely. Of course, it is important to ensure that your staff are well-trained and properly prepared before you assume the issue is one of numbers.

The challenges of call center workforce management

The management of a call center’s workforce is a strain. It needs to meet the ever-growing demands for fast customer service. It must also manage the complicated interactions between agents and managers. A variety of issues come into the spotlight.

  1. Hard-to-forecast workload demands: Demands for call center managers frequently face unanticipated workload spikes that tend to be caused by external forces that are beyond their control.
  2. Around-the-clock operational requirements: Continuous operational requirements around the clock In order to be able to meet the needs of customers needs shifts, rotations and constant monitoring to ensure that service is delivered seamlessly.
  3. Using manual spreadsheets:  Relying on manual spreadsheets for tasks such as shift scheduling can result in mistakes, errors, and inefficiencies.
  4. Excessive absenteeism: Disengagement and absences that are unexpected interfere with the flow of work and put an additional burden on the present agents.
  5. Staff attrition: Agents in call centers have to deal with increased stress at work. Training and recruitment become continuous procedures, consuming resources and degrading performance.
  6. Ensuring agents adhere to their shifts and breaks: Assuring that agents follow their schedules, breaks and shifts It’s a constant challenge to track when agents are clocking to enter and leave.
  7. Financial restrictions: Small budgets can hinder the acquisition of tools and equipment and hinder workforce growth.
  8. Communication gaps with upper management: A lack of communication between the managers and agents can result in an impression gap. It can cause agents to feel unimportant and insignificant.
  9. Balancing customer expectations: The balance between customer expectations and handling the variety of concerns and questions from customers demands effective, skilled task division. WFM must ensure that customers receive timely and accurate service, while utilizing limited resources.
  10. Adapting to technological changes: The constant technology advancements require managers and agents to remain current.

How WFM teams can measure and impact call center metrics

To efficiently execute these processes, WFM teams need goals that are in line with the elements that are listed above. Let’s take a look at how managers of call centers can assess and influence the key indicator of performance (KPIs).

  • Cost management
    With a greater amount of historical data and a better understanding of consumer trends, call center managers can make more accurate calls center predictions. With this information they can make sure they have the proper amount of agents, without over-scheduling. More accurate forecasts usually mean improved cost management. Managers of contact centers with years of experience have the ability to use specific instruments (see the section below) to forecast the needs of their customers and estimate the cost.


  • Customer satisfaction
    Cost cutting too much could result in long wait times and high levels of abandonment. Both of these can result in satisfaction scores for customers (CSAT) to drop. With the help of dedicated software for call centers, managers can monitor CSAT and other related metrics such as net promoter scores (NPS) in a way that is automatic. Then, they can compare these measures of success against budgetary requirements.


  • Operational efficiency
    If workdays are smooth and forecasts are accurate, call centers are able to run smoothly. But when unexpected situations arise the call center manager needs plans B. The tracking of preparation measures such as BCPs, SOPs or business plans are the very first step. Managers can also utilize WFM tools to establish goals and pinpoint issues that require resolution.

  • Agent retention
    Contact center employees who have scheduled schedules that are predictable, able to handle their workloads, and the chance to develop are generally happy employees. Managers can influence these outcomes through strategies such as automated call distribution or skilled-based routing. Managers may also employ software for workforce management to track the agent’s engagement KPIs. Naturally high engagement rates usually correspond with better retention rates and this is a factor in the management of costs and operational efficiency.

Frequently Asked Questions

The job description includes preparing schedules, monitoring live activity in the call center, changing levels of staff, evaluating the performance of agents and ensuring that the right agents are assigned to manage customer interactions.

The purpose of workforce management is to improve schedules of employees, anticipate the demand, evaluate productivity and to maintain an equilibrium between the quality of customer service and operational expenses.

The workforce management professionals are responsible for forecasting demand, making schedules for agents, evaluating the performance of agents in real-time, and then adjusting the staffing levels to meet service goals typically using software tools.

The process of managing the workforce (WFM) refers to the method to maximize the efficiency of employees by anticipating the needs of labor, scheduling employees as well as tracking attendance and time and assessing the overall performance of the workforce.

Workforce management in a contact center is focused on ensuring that the correct amount of agents are in place at the appropriate moments to handle the interactions of customers efficiently. It includes forecasting call volume and creating schedules, ensuring the compliance of agents and enhancing the quality of service in a contact center.

Request a Demo