What Is Call Center Workforce Management & How To Optimize It?

If you have ever been into retail, you will know how busy the holiday season gets. The customers flooding in for last-minute shopping, with long queues at the billing counters and a sense of urgency in the air.

The holiday rush is not just a surge in sales but also a test of the team’s ability to handle high demand and offer a positive customer experience amidst the chaos.

Similarly, a call center usually has peak times on weekends. If you don’t manage your staff efficiently during rush hours, you will fail to cater to your customers. This will lead to customers getting frustrated, lower CSAT scores, and overburdened agents.

The average call abandonment rate is around 5% to 8%. But if your graphs are near 10%, it’s alarming. This means that your resources are either short-staffed or mismanaged to handle the calls.

Call center Workforce management helps manage staff, forecast staffing needs, track and analyze analytics, and deliver exceptional customer service. 

Read on to find out how you can optimize your call center workforce to align with your needs.

Call center workforce management (WFM) is the practice of forecasting how many contacts will arrive, scheduling the right number of agents with the right skills for each interval, and tracking performance in real time so you can adjust. The same approach applies to a contact center that handles chat and email as well as calls.

What is Workforce Management in a Call Center?

Workforce management is the process of managing agents to meet rising demands and maintain operational efficiency. 

As a manager, you need to be able to:  

• Accurately predict peak times
• Assign the right agents at the right times based on their skill level
• Monitor call outputs, agent productivity, and other variables 
• Analyze operational data and report 
• Curate strategies to meet customer demands and avoid staff burnout

WFM, when done in the right way, helps call centers manage peak times effortlessly while delivering outstanding customer service and satisfaction and boosting agent engagement.

Traditionally, managers use spreadsheets, calendars, and simple documents to manage the workforce. But these are not synchronized with one another and are too hectic to ensure a smooth WFM.

This calls for advanced software solutions and tools that compile everything in one place, simplifying WFM for you. From scheduling to forecasting, data analytics, and attendance tracking, you can have a comprehensive tool that suits all your needs.

Why is Workforce Management in Call Centers Important?

Call center workforce management ensures that your team and customers have what they need. An effective WFM is one that balances both the requirements of your customers and staff, enabling you to offer quality customer service and avoid staff burnout.

Here are some prominent reasons why you need workforce management in your call center.

• Maintaining service levels – This ensures that you have the right staff at the right times according to demand levels.
• Optimizing employee performance – It helps you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your employees. Therefore, it allows you to allocate them smartly. Plus, when you know the weak points, you can modify the training module for improvement.
• Optimizing labor costs – A great WFM strategy prevents both over and understaffing helping you save costs on hiring more people or wasted hours due to overstaffing.
• Boost customer experience – Having the right number of agents with suitable skills on the shifts helps you quickly and accurately close customer tickets, improving the FCR and CSAT rates.

5 Fundamentals of Call Center Workforce Management

There are four principal elements of workforce management in a call center that ensure a successful WFM. These fundamental pillars help you incorporate an ideal WFM that meets your requirements and goals.

You must take into account all these elements while creating an effective WFM in your contact center.

1. Demand Forecasting

To meet peak time demands and standard customer service, you must schedule your agents smartly. But how will you prepare beforehand without knowing the potential surge hours?

This is where demand forecasting comes into play. Demand forecasting refers to the process of predicting customer calls or tickets in the upcoming days, weeks, or months. 

It is done by analyzing historical trends of customer interactions over calls, email, and chat. This data analysis uncovers the hidden pattern that gives you your call center’s potential peak hours or days.

Further demand forecasting also depends on factors like:

• Product launch
• Seasonal sales
• Promotions
• Product upgrades

For example, your contact center will have more tickets on the days after a new product launches. So, you should prepare yourself in advance for such cases. 

2. Employee Scheduling

Once you have your demand forecast report in hand, you can start scheduling your agents accordingly. 

Forecast data will help you decide when and where you need more or less staff. This will prevent you from understaffing and overstaffing. To complement scheduling, managers can generate accurate employee pay stubs (including overtime, shift differentials, and deductions) with the FormPros online paystub maker to keep payroll transparent and maintain agent trust.

With employee scheduling using software, you can ensure shorter wait times, improve FCR, maximize cost efficiency, and boost overall customer satisfaction.

3. Assigning Agents

Once you know when and where you need your staff, you should start assigning your agents.

You should plan your staff based on their skill levels to fill the lowest to highest shifts. To assess their skills, you should consider their call-handling ability, length of service, customer feedback, and overall performance.

This ensures that when the demand is high, you are well-equipped with expert agents who are proficient in handling customers in the best possible way in a demanding work environment.

4. Real-time Team Management

As a manager, you should be able to see the real-time status of your employees. Workforce management software enables you to check your employee’s status throughout the day. This way, you can assess their performance and plan training strategies for improvement. 

Real-time team management comes in handy when you have an unexpected rise in customer demands. It allows you to immediately assign agents to meet the demands.

5. Data Analytics

Reporting and data analytics play an important role in ensuring successful workforce management in call centers. 

With the right WFM software, you get advanced data analytics features. These features help you process your call center data into reports that give you valuable insights and track key metrics.

Thanks to the WFM reports and real-time employee monitoring, you can accurately predict peak hours, assess your staff performance, allocate agents, meet customer demands, and eventually boost the overall call center FCR and CSAT scores.

How to calculate call center staffing

Staffing starts with workload. Workload is the number of contacts in an interval multiplied by the average handle time. Divide it by the length of the interval to get the number of agents who would be busy the whole time.

Here is a simple example for one 30 minute interval. Assume 120 calls arrive and the average handle time is 5 minutes.

• Workload: 120 calls x 5 minutes = 600 minutes, which is 10 hours of work.
• Agents needed at full occupancy: 10 hours / 0.5 hour = 20 agents.
• Agents needed at 85% occupancy: 20 / 0.85 = 23.5, so plan for 24 agents on the phones.
• Agents to schedule with 25% shrinkage: 24 / 0.75 = 32 agents.

Shrinkage is the share of paid time agents are not available, such as breaks, training, meetings and leave. The 85% and 25% figures above are assumptions for the example, so use your own numbers. Our guide to call center shrinkage shows how to measure yours, and the average handle time guide covers the other input.

This method is a starting point. It ignores the randomness of call arrivals, so teams with strict answer-time targets usually add an Erlang C model, which most workforce management software includes.

Call center workforce management metrics

A workforce plan is only as good as the numbers you check against it. These are the metrics most WFM teams review every day and every week.

• Service level: the share of contacts answered within a set time, such as a target agreed in your call center SLAs.
• Schedule adherence: the share of scheduled time an agent spends in the activity the schedule shows.
• Occupancy: the share of logged-in time an agent spends handling contacts. Very high occupancy for long periods is a burnout risk.
• Forecast accuracy: how close the forecast volume was to the actual volume, by interval.
• Abandonment rate: the share of callers who hang up before an agent answers.
• Shrinkage: the share of paid time agents are unavailable for contacts.

For a wider list, see these call center metrics.

Workforce management software features

Spreadsheets break down once you have several queues, skills or locations. Contact center workforce management software replaces them with one system. When you compare tools, check for these features.

• Forecasting by channel and interval, using past volume and planned events such as launches and promotions
• Automatic scheduling that respects skills, shift rules and time off requests
• Intraday management, so you can move people when volume differs from the forecast
• Agent self-service for shift swaps and leave requests
• Adherence tracking and reports you can export
• Integration with your phone system and the rest of your contact center stack

Staffing gets you the right number of people. It does not make each person fast on a call they have never handled. A searchable call center knowledge base helps newer agents resolve contacts correctly during a peak, which keeps handle time close to the number your forecast assumed.

Call center workforce management FAQ

What is workforce management in a call center?

It is the process of forecasting contact volume, scheduling agents to match it, and monitoring staffing in real time. The goal is to meet your service level without paying for idle time or overloading agents. It covers forecasting, scheduling, real-time adjustments and reporting.

What does a workforce management team do?

A WFM team builds the volume forecast, converts it into staffing requirements, creates schedules and manages shift trades. During the day they watch real-time queues and move agents between tasks or queues. Afterward they report on forecast accuracy, adherence and service level.

What is the difference between forecasting and scheduling?

Forecasting predicts how many contacts will arrive in each interval. Scheduling turns that prediction into shifts, breaks and days off for named agents. A schedule can only be as good as the forecast behind it, so forecast errors show up as long queues or idle agents.

What is shrinkage in workforce management?

Shrinkage is the percentage of paid time that agents are not available to handle contacts. It includes breaks, training, meetings, coaching and leave. You schedule extra agents to cover it, so a higher shrinkage figure means a larger headcount for the same workload.

Do small call centers need workforce management software?

Not always. A small team with one queue and stable volume can forecast and schedule in a spreadsheet. Software becomes worth considering when you add channels or locations, when volume swings by hour, or when manual schedules take more time than the team can spare.

How can Knowmax Help? 

Knowmax, a CX-first knowledge management system, helps you consolidate all relevant information in one place, creating a single source of truth for agents. 

This single source of truth assists agents with the right knowledge to quickly find the right solutions to customer queries. Therefore, it enables agents to deliver consistent, mistake-proof customer service even during rush hours. 

Knowmax ensures successful workforce management in call centers with its feature-rich knowledge base solution that equips agents to meet customer expectations in challenging work environments.