Call Center Workforce Management (WFM) 101

00:00Hi, guys. Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird Hi there, everyone. Welcome back to Advice from a Call Center Geek. My name is Tom Laird. I'm the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. We are a 500 seat call center outsourcing company located here in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Got a little bit of snow today, our first taste of it. Pretty though, it's one of those, you know, kind of big flakes falling down, no accumulation, just kind of nice. That time of year, I might get a fire going tonight when I Yeah, when I get home. Anyway, for those of you joining us for the first time, welcome, this is a call center operations podcast where we try to really give you some actionable items, not just talk about theories of customer service and call center, but try to give you some real items to take back to your call center to hopefully improve the overall agent quality, to improve your culture, and hopefully improve your customer experience as well.

01:55Well, I just got back, speaking of, I guess, snowing and colder, I got back from three days where I was in Salt Lake. I was visiting the Nice in Contact headquarters. I kind of have the privilege of being on the Nice in Contact ICVC board, which is kind of their customer visionary council. So any type of, we see the roadmap, we are asked to give feedback on where we see the industry going, where we see the new tools that Nice in Contact has. It's a mix of a lot of different customers. I'm not gonna name them or even talk about their companies. I don't think that that's right, but everything from really large, multinational Fortune 500 companies down to BPOs that are 500 seats to some 211 type emergency call center. So it's a huge mix, really cool people, really smart, intelligent people. I'm actually gonna have a couple of them.

02:48I've expressed some interest coming on to the podcast. And again, these are kind of hand in the dirt call center ops, really cool people that understand not only the technology, but understand a lot of the different policies, procedures, and things that it takes to run a world class contact center. So it's really always cool to go have some beers and kind of talk to those guys too, even outside of the meeting time. So again, really excited and had a lot of fun doing that. I'm gonna do a couple podcasts in the next couple days. One of them is gonna be on my trip there. We're gonna talk about not just the nice in contact roadmap. I'm not gonna, I was given a little bit of proprietary stuff, so I don't wanna talk about that. but just the overall genesis of where we think the industry's going and where In Contact thinks it's going, which I think correlates pretty well with where the rest of the industry is going.

03:35I also have some kind of tips and some things that I heard from some of my friends and colleagues that were there too that I wanna share with you that I think could be really interesting. But today's episode is one that I, again, I've had a lot of you ask questions on and I've been kind of trying to find the right moment where I have enough time to kind of prepare for it And on my flight, kind of going and coming to and from Salt Lake, I had some time to put some thoughts down on this and hopefully that this is helpful. So I want to talk about workforce management and how do you make sure that you have the right agent available at the right time to take the call. We can't be too fat, right? We can't be sitting there waiting for calls and not being productive, but then again, we can't burn our agents out either.

04:22So how do we find that sweet spot? What are some of the tips and some of the things that we look for with that? This episode, if you are a workforce management executive or if you work in a large company running their workforce management, it's probably not the episode for you. You could probably come on here and help me with it. This is for those of you who are on the call center floor that are wondering how those guys do their job. How do they find out to get to those staffing numbers? This is for those of you who are, maybe you're the call center manager, the trainer, you're the floor supervisor, you kind of do a little bit of everything and you don't have the tools or the technology to really figure out how do you do WFM well. And I think that if that's you out there right now, this is going to be super helpful for you and I'm kind of excited for you for this too because I think I can make your job a little bit easier.

05:15So to start with this, we just kind of launched today, and it's no new technology or anything like that, but I wanted to make something that kind of correlated with this episode. So we made our own call center staffing calculator, which we're going to talk about here. And again, this is totally free. This is just a tool for you to use. I hope it helps. I think it's kind of fun to see and kind of fun to use as well. But if you go to ExpiviaUSA.com forward slash staffing dash calculator and I'll have the link in the podcast notes as well. We have our own call center staffing calculator. And what this is called, and you can find them out there. This is not obviously proprietary to us. We did not come up with this. It's called an Erlang C calculator or just an Erlang calculator and basically it's some statistics and some math that go into a formula that kind of take into account your KPIs and your business use cases and what you're kind of looking to do and kind of spits out the number that will get you to kind of the goal that you're setting forth.

06:33So I don't know if that was kind of mumbledrum a little bit. So basically what you're going to do is you're going to put in some variables like your handle time, service level, answer time, your shrinkage, and as long as you kind of know your staffing, historical staffing levels by interval, it's going to help you kind of correlate. How do you get to those numbers? How do you get to that service level? This is the amount of people that you're going to need taking into account a lot of your different business variables. So let's break this down. So again, this is a pretty simplistic method. It's super effective. You don't have to be crazy here. Again, if your organization has a kind of an enterprise workforce management solution like us, like we use IEX, we use that kind of a nice in contact product. But if you have an aspect or a Monet, Sierra, or a workforce management tool, or you have IEX that I know a lot of you out there have from a workforce management, that's going to do all this work for you.

07:31So it's going to not only tell you how many agents you're going to have to have at a a certain interval, but it's going to be constantly pulling real-time historical and historical data to constantly be updating your staffing formulas and constantly updating your numbers and then even working with your scheduling and really cool tools. I mean, not only that, you can look at forecasts for future volume. If your volume increases by 10, 20, 30%, what will that do to your staffing? You're really working on a lot of that stuff. So again, that stuff's really cool. If you have it, you probably move on to another one of the episodes because you're going to really probably not need this but again for everybody else out there that does not have that that's looking to to improve their staffing this this is this one's for you the number one thing that you need and there's really four or five basic things that you need that all of you should should have and probably can spit off the top of your head number one is you need your calls per interval so your historical calls you know let's just hypothetically say that your your Your center opens the door at 8 a.m. and it closes at 9 p.m., right?

08:35So every single interval, 9 to 10, 10 to 11, 11 to 12, how many calls do you get? 210, the first interval, 230, the second. And you need to know that, right, whether it's by half hour by hour, you need to know your overall handle time, right? So basically you need to know how long your call is. It's pretty difficult to show you how much staff you're going to need if you don't know how long agents are going to be on the phone. I think that's pretty self-explanatory. And number three, you need to define your service level. So the industry average for all of you guys out there, it's pretty much an 80-30, so meaning 80% of your calls answered within 30 seconds or less. Now we have clients that are all over the board with service level. So some of them want a 90-10, so 90% of all calls answered within 10 seconds or less, and some of them have much less stringent service-level adherence numbers. We have a lot of clients too that, you know, based on the skill, right, we're trying to do some different things with different service levels. So you have to know your culture, you have to know what your customers can handle, and really kind of define that number. Not to sidetrack this, but one of the really cool things when I was out in Salt Lake, you know, gave a presentation of the group on our analytic tool, which I know I'd probably beat to death on this probably too much, but and one of the cool things we've talked about here on the podcast is having the ability to look at sentiment scores based on whole time, right? So you kind of know, you know, what your service level is when a customer starts to get irritated. So if your customers, you know, again, I'm not recommending this, I mean, I'm recommending that you stick to an 8030. But let's say you have budgetary issues, and you can't staff to an 8030. You know, if you don't have analytics, you can still be listening to customers and try to find different segments of time, right? So, you know, listen at the 30 seconds in queue, 40 seconds in queue, 50 seconds in queue, then when they go to an agent, kind of find out, you know, at what point, and you can, you can actually do this manually, I've done it many a time, do your customers actually start to get irritated.

10:39Most of the time, they're willing to wait longer than 30 seconds. A lot of times, it's in that first, you know, minute, minute and a half that you start to get a little bit of irritation. So 80-30s, I think, you know, really for a world class center, talking about those type of metrics, anything that or higher, but you can get away with some other things and still not irritate customers. So again, define your service level. And then the fourth, which is kind of important and it correlates to a lot of different things is shrinkage. A lot of people call this, you know, don't use that term, but that's kind of been the term that's kind of, you know, kind of gone through in the industry. So shrinkage is basically, you know, I always just think of my shrinkage is the amount of call-offs or leaves or people on vacation that we have.

11:26But it is more than that. There's really two types of shrinkage. Number one is your external shrinkage, excuse me, external shrinkage, which is exactly that, your call-offs, your leave-earlies, you know, anyone who's on, you know, paid time off, those types of things. And then you have internal shrinkage, which is, you know, coaching, break time, games, maybe that you're playing. Your culture defines your shrinkage a little bit, too, if you have reps off the phone a little bit more, and then that's going to correlate to that. And then, you know, it's a pretty, I think, self-explanatory if you think it through kind of calculation for your shrinkage, but basically the calculation goes, you know, your total internal shrinkage hours plus your total external shrinkage hours divided by the total hours available and then just times it by 100 to get your percentage. That gets you your shrinkage percentage.

12:21For us, most of our programs, we are in between a 10% and 15%. That basically means if this workforce management calculation said I need, if I put zero shrinkage in, I needed 10 reps for an interval, once I put shrinkage of 10% and obviously it's going to say I'm going to need another rep, I'm going to need 11 to meet that service level. Again, that kind of correlates to what you want to do. There's other things that you really don't need because that shrinkage number kind of takes into account for a lot of it. One of the people that I always ask about is occupancy, which is basically the percentage of time that a... For us, it's the percentage of time a rep is in kind of a paid state or an billable state for a client. But for most of you, it's going to be your talk time plus your after call work time.

13:13That's basically what it is. We can get pretty granular with it. That's really the times that they're talking, they're working with the customer. The average occupancy for us, and I think pretty much industry is 75% occupancy or 75% really working with the customer. You can't go more than that. You're going to burn people out. And if you start to get into that 60-50, then you're not as efficient as you need to be as well. So we can almost do a whole other podcast on kind of occupancy, shrinkage, those types of things, because I think there's a lot that does play with it. But basically, through this calculator, and if any of you are on that or looking at the calculator or will, you know, later, there's basically a box for those four things. So you're going to put your average handle time in, you're going to put your service level that you want, and that's the cool thing with the calculator is that you can actually do a little bit of forecasting, not crazy forecasting, but find out what the difference is between a 70% service level and a 90% service level.

14:13What does that mean to your staffing? You're going to put your answer time. So that's basically that second service level number, right? So an 80-30 is 30 seconds or less, or do you want an 80-40 or an 80-50? The other thing you can do with this too is now that that kind of pops in my head is don't just think of voice calls. So you can use this calculator for your chat. If you know what some of those things are and what you want to do from a KPI standpoint, and you can even do emails, right? So even if you have a 24-hour SLA or you have a 4-hour SLA, you can kind of put those numbers in here to find out how many staff you need for emails as well. And then you're going to look and put your shrinkage percentage in. And if you have no idea and you're like, I don't know, what do I put in for there?

14:56I would tell you, I would start with about 15% unless you have a pretty well-run contact center. Then I think you're right around 10%. If you have a lot of issues or you have a ton of call-offs, you know, you can be in that 20-25% and that's not good, by the way, we'll have to talk some of that stuff through. I would check out my attendance podcast if that's where you are. And then the last thing you're going to do is we have a kind of time slots, right, starting at midnight and working your way up. So whatever your hours of operation are, go look at your historical forecasts or have a rough idea of how many calls you're getting per interval. If you don't know that, you need to start tracking it and put it every day in an Excel form and then, boom, put it in there and it's going to actually just instantly spit out the number of agents that you need.

15:48Workforce management, when you get to very large contact centers, gets extremely complex. You can't really use this type of calculation if you're, you know, really I would start to say 200 agents and more, and you're kind of pushing it probably at that level. But if you're 200 more, you really need to start to invest in some type of real workforce management tool that kind of can correlate all this data for you, plus add in your forecast, plus add in all your scheduling. But if you don't, or you got a 50 seater, you got a 20 seater, you got even a 100, 150 seat contact center, and you're wondering what's going to happen during your busy season, And your call volume goes from 50 calls an interval to 110 calls per interval. Throw those numbers in here and be able to not only again use this for what you have now, but use it as a forecasting tool to make sure that you can understand and you know what's coming.

16:44You don't have to use ours either, I mean I would love for you guys to send me some traffic. Again, I'm not collecting any data, I'm not selling anything, I just want to be a cool resource for everybody. And hopefully I can come up with even some other things. I got some other ideas too. We have a, obviously we have the staffing calculator. We also have which I have a link on here too. We have the call center savings calculator. So you can actually go and put in all of your real data from your call center and really find out what an agent is costing you. I think it's a really cool and I think that's a fun tool as well. And sometimes it's eye opening especially to higher management to realize what you're really paying for. It's not just the agent's salary and your CRM and your per minute on your phone system.

17:31There's a lot that goes into it and I think that kind of helps you too. That's my WFM kind of baseline basic podcast. I'm going to do another one of these where we can kind of break down a little bit more and I'm going to get into maybe some of the IEX and some of the tools that are kind an enterprise workforce management tool has so that you guys have an idea if you're thinking about maybe moving that way. But if you're not and you have a center that you know is relatively manageable and you just need to really tweak people's schedules and really understand how many agents you need to meet certain service levels or if you're getting pressure from your higher-ups like hey we have to get to an 80% service level and you're not sure how to do that. This is a starting point for you. Obviously there's a lot of other things that you can can do as well. But I think you know, you need to be able to staff your your center appropriately. So thank you guys very much. I, I hope that that's helpful. I want to just again, throw out, you know, a couple of my my cheap plugs. Again, we have more advice from a call center geek, which is our call center operations book, it's on Amazon, it's actually starting to really pick up sales wise. So pretty excited for that.

18:42Check that out if you're if you're interested in the podcast, you would definitely like the book. And then please, please, please go on Facebook, we have advice from a call Center Geek Facebook page, we have the Twitter account, we have our LinkedIn account, please like us or follow us on all or one of those social media mediums, really trying to build that community up and I think that's starting to go. We're over almost 13,000 downloads of the podcast, which is pretty awesome. So again, all you Call Center Geeks out there, I really appreciate it, thank you very much and be ready listening probably over the weekend where I'm going to talk about what I learned that at nice in contact. And again, we'll do another where we think the industry is going not long term, because that's, you know, kind of theoretical stuff, and we kind of try to stay away from that. But hardcore, real time stuff that's coming up here in the next, you know, 12 to 12 to 18 months. Again, thank you guys very much. And I will talk to you in a couple days.