As an organisation with a customer contact department, you surely know it: busy times when the phone is constantly ringing, the chat queue keeps growing, and the inbox is overflowing. Yet, there are also periods when it’s quiet, and the staffing is too large. 

It can be quite challenging to align your workforce planning with this fluctuating demand. Sometimes things might go awry, resulting in long waiting times, frustrated customers, and a team under high pressure. 

Workforce Management (WFM) helps to better handle varying volumes. With flexible staffing plans and smart forecasts, you ensure calmness within your organisation and satisfied customers on the line. But what exactly is WFM? And what benefits does it bring?

What is Workforce Management (WFM)?

Workforce Management (WFM) is the collective term for all processes and systems that help organisations match staff deployment as closely as possible to demand. 

For customer contact, this includes:

• forecasting volumes: how many calls, chats, or emails will there be?

• planning capacity: how many staff members do you need to meet the demand?

• scheduling staff: who works when, considering preferences and availability.

• real-time adjustments: being able to adapt if it becomes busier or quieter than expected.

Do you sometimes have at least double the customer queries at certain moments, and things get a bit chaotic? Especially during holidays, specific seasons, launches, or breakdowns? This can be different! Fortunately so. Long waiting times, upset customers, and overwhelmed staff: it’s unpleasant for everyone. 

With WFM, the opposite happens. With a well-set WFM system, you gain control over planning, reduce waste of hours, and ensure the right people are ready for customers at the right time. The system predicts based on historical data and trends how much extra capacity is needed. Schedules are adjusted accordingly, potentially with extra flexible staff. During peak hours, real-time monitoring and adjustments are made. The result? Shorter waiting times, satisfied customers, and a team working smoothly and confidently.

Why does your organisation need WFM?

Many organisations still plan purely based on experience, using, for instance, Excel schedules. This might often work well, but when volumes fluctuate, problems usually quickly accumulate. Do you recognise these challenges? 

• Managing peaks is difficult
  During busy periods, long waiting times arise. Customers become frustrated, turn away, or take their queries to competitors.

• There’s unrest in the team
  If staff are routinely overburdened, it leads to stress and high turnover. Conversely, understaffing can lead to boredom or inefficiency.

• Staff are dissatisfied and frustrated by unfair schedules
  Without proper planning, staff feel their schedules don’t match their preferences or that the workload is unequally distributed.

• You don’t know how to improve or optimise situations
  Your organisation consistently reacts to issues because you lack clarity on where exactly the bottlenecks are or how to optimise operations.

The benefits of WFM for customer contact

By deploying Workforce Management for customer contact , you transform how you organise customer contact. Especially when dealing with peak burdens, seasonal intensity, or campaigns that trigger many queries, WFM is indispensable. Also, if waiting times are consistently increasing, schedules often don’t meet the actual demand, or you lack insight to make well-informed decisions, it’s wise to get started with WFM. But what does it bring your organisation? 

These are the main benefits of WFM in customer contact:

1. Higher customer satisfaction

With a well-coordinated plan, you ensure minimal waiting times and increased accessibility. Customers receive a professional service.

2. Satisfied and motivated staff

WFM provides predictable, fair, and often also flexible schedules. Staff know what to expect and experience less stress during peak times because this can be anticipated. WFM contributes to engagement and lower attrition rates.

3. Efficient use of capacity

A smart WFM approach prevents over or under-staffing. You utilise available hours optimally, directly saving costs. You only incur costs for what is truly necessary.

4. Insight and control

With dashboards and data-driven reports from a WFM system, you can see exactly where your capacity aligns well and where improvements are possible. This makes it easier to substantiate decisions with management or executives and make real-time adjustments where necessary.

5. Flexibility with changing volumes

Whether you face seasonal influences, campaign effects, or unforeseen situations: with WFM, quick scaling up or down is always possible. Thus, you always effectively respond to what the customer demands. 

Organise your customer contact more professionally and efficiently? 

Workforce Management helps you better handle peaks and troughs in volumes. It's not a luxury but a necessity if you want to organise customer contact professionally and efficiently. WFM ensures your customers are quickly assisted, and staff work more happily because the schedule is accurate, leading to more stable workloads. WFM provides control, calm, and satisfied customers. Precisely what you need when accessibility and service make a difference!

Want to know how to organise your customer contact smarter with WFM? Get in touch for advice or a demo. Meet our professionals through Book an appointment. We’d love to show you more about a workforce management system.