Enterprise-grade WFO: Provides a rich set of pre-built connectors to the most common CCaaS, ACD, CRM and HR-platforms and APIs to build custom integrations. This gives enterprise customers the freedom to integrate the full contact center stack for complete optimization across all channels and support systems. An enterprise-grade WFO suite also offers the ability to self-serve in editing and configuring integrations.

Basic WFO: Basic WFO: Has limited integrations to only certain customer experience (CX) platforms, leaving you with blind spots and siloed, manual management of non-integrated channels.

Enterprise-grade WFO: Can be used to forecast for various channels such as social, email, chat, text and more. Omnichannel interactions can be forecasted and appropriately scheduled, with forecasting tools that enable concurrency for agents handling multiple chats. Multi-skilled agents benefit from a robust resource allocation method, allowing schedulers to accurately create schedules that handle both single-skilled and multi-skilled agents.

Enterprise-grade WFO provides the ability to import, export data to and from external sources, select multiple historical datasets as an input to forecasting, forecast and schedule down a 15-min interval level. It applies seasonality patterns through complex algorithms and allows users to highly customize inputs and outputs. Shrinkage can be dynamic and automated, which results in far more accurate planning. Finally, advanced solutions allow you to run forecasts and schedules in multiple “what if” scenarios. Scheduling can handle labor laws from any country thanks to the highly configurable work rules, making scaling up your business a possibility.

Basic WFO: Relies on basic forecasting methods that can only utilize limited historical data, most times 1 week. Shrinkage is a fixed number that cannot be customized by interval, let alone be automated, in turn hurting the accuracy of planning and increasing the manual work planners must put in. Users are unable to run multiple scenarios and lack the customization of inputs and output. They generally can only forecast at a 30-min interval and can’t handle multi-skilled agent in an omnichannel environment.

Without the needed configuration options, you will simply reach a less accurate forecast to build your schedule from. Planners will further have to adapt your schedule practice to the way the basic WFO operates, instead of optimizing the schedule the way you want. Work rules are simplistic and automatic scheduling only runs one week, isolated, at a time. Basic WFO platforms lack the possibility of optimizing breaks and activities, relying on manual labor to handle daily changes needed to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Editing schedules in bulk is not possible and planning large meetings or training is incredibly labor intensive. The result is increased operational costs or decreased service for your customers.

Finally, there is no functionality to handle seniority or performance-based scheduling to let associates bid on desired schedules, and instead having contact center leadership teams assign schedules manually, lowering employee engagement due to optimal processes not being supported.

Enterprise-grade WFO: Makes it easy for your quality team to do their job. With one-click they have access to view, playback, evaluate, analyze and coach omnichannel interactions. You won’t pay extra to record different channels and they won’t have to click on multiple tabs or jump to multiple windows to perform evaluations. Your quality managers are busy and do not have time for complicated, inefficient tools that make their job harder.

Basic WFO: Quality solutions can give evaluators a headache and anxiety by making it hard for them to access and use the quality assurance tools they need throughout the day.

Enterprise-grade WFO: Enterprise-grade WFO: Takes what can be overly complicated and makes it practical and usable. With enterprise-grade WFO analytics tools you get access to speech, desktop and text analytics all in one user-friendly solution for true business value.

Basic WFO: Basic WFO: Lacks analytics capabilities. Sometimes this means you will get access to basic voice transcriptions only. To get true insights on customer and employee experience you will be forced to buy separate applications that are loosely integrated with multiple user interfaces. This makes interaction analytics complicated, siloed and expensive.

Enterprise-grade WFO: Makes it easy to automatically combine omnichannel data from across the WFO suite and across the enterprise for a complete visualization of the customer journey. Enterprise-grade WFO provides self-service business intelligence for all channels that anyone can use – from the frontline of the contact center to business users, and on to the boardroom. With enterprise-grade WFO you’ll spend less time creating reports and dashboards and more time using them to drive continual improvements.

Basic WFO: Offers basic reporting. Full-suite omnichannel WFO reporting and business intelligence is either not available or offered as a separate, expensive, and complicated add-on product. This forces you to integrate, manage, and learn yet another reporting solution.

Enterprise-grade WFO: Vendors help you customize your solution to your specific business requirements during implementation and give you the tools and resources needed so you can further customize and optimize the solution as your business grows and your needs change. No need to deal with the hassle of going back to the vendor and paying for costly, time-consuming professional services or additional products.

Basic WFO: Will take you only so far and then make it complicated when your needs change or you have additional enterprise-grade requirements such as encryption, custom metadata, live monitoring, screen recording, bulk export, omnichannel recording, omnichannel analytics, PCI compliance, automatic multi-skill scheduling, schedule adherence to work policies, meeting and training planning etc.

Enterprise-grade WFO: Gives you the tools to predict what will happen next and be proactive in coaching, training and scheduling your employees. It helps you identify trends and the outliers such as rockstar agents, underperformers and overstaffing.

Basic WFO: Either doesn’t offer this enterprise-grade capability, will charge you extra for it, or force you to purchase separate tools from a 3rd party vendor. Again, this makes it more difficult to manage the solution and for users to do their job.

Enterprise-grade WFO: Has a focus on true business intelligence that is centered on the contact center and WFO. You need dynamic, customizable, drill-through dashboards and data-visualization tools that are fully integrated with your WFO suite so you can quickly get the voice-of-the-customer business insights you need without having to go through your IT team.

Basic WFO: Offers canned reports by application and makes it complicated to automatically tie together and visualize the voice of your customer and agent. These kinds of questions remain unanswered: What is the impact that agent adherence has on quality scores? What impact does the current marketing campaign have on call volume, handle time and agent satisfaction?

Enterprise-grade WFO: Includes a mobile app with all the functionality an agent can access on their desktop to give agents freedom to view schedules, be notified, review performance, build their own schedule, make overtime, vacation and schedule change requests, trade shifts and other tasks, wherever they are.

Basic WFO: Either completely lacks a mobile app or has a simplistic schedule viewer without any possibility for agents to provide input. Sometimes Basic WFM-vendors point customers to a separate agent mobile add-on with different technology or 3rd party technology, leading to a completely different user experience when it is cobbled together with the Basic WFO. Even though some may a good User Interface, they completely miss on scheduling principles such as rotations and optimization.

Enterprise-grade WFO: Allows a customer to set up alarms and notifications related to the adherence of agents. They are capable of handling true real-time integrations that provide immediate feedback to contact center leadership team on where resources are being utilized.

Basic WFO: Generally lacks in real-time integrations, and even when available, does not allow users to customize alerts and rules of adherence, edit historical adherence exceptions, or even view detailed states.

Enterprise-grade WFO: Allows a customer to set rules and thresholds to automate intraday schedule management. Agents can equally manage and change their own schedules, creating more flexibility in contact center operations and helping businesses better tackle agent stress.

For example, agents can add work hours on an unscheduled or scheduled day or move their breaks and lunches themselves as unexpected things happen throughout each day without negatively impacting the contact center’s service level. Agents also have the ability to request time off and for it to be automatically processed without impacting contact centers KPIs, meaning agents receive immediate feedback on the status of their request. Similarly, they can trade their shifts with others via automatic approvals.

Basic WFO: May allow a limited set of self-service features for agents, but lack the guardrails needed to automate management of schedule change requests. This leads to risks to service levels or manual processing, which frustrates supervisor and agents, and makes it impossible to use at scale. There are no thresholds to automatically determine over and understaffing.

To start, they will need a workstation and a solid Internet connection. Laptops are preferred for flexibility, but desktops work as well. They will also need a headset and a webcam if their computer doesn’t have one embedded. This is a great opportunity to engage your managed services team for additional ideas. Use wired headsets that connect either through USB, 3.5mm audio hack or standard red/white RCA cable. Avoid wireless or Bluetooth headsets if possible; any interference from an agent’s home devices could lead to dropped calls. Wired devices make things much easier from a support perspective. Most standard webcams will work, including those built into laptop frames. For agents using desktops, seek out a webcam that can clip onto the top of their monitor. While many standard webcams capture audio, avoid using them as the only audio output. You’ll want agents to have clear communication with customers.

If possible, have agents hard-wire their computers with an Ethernet cable to their home routers. Wireless connections may experience interference if other nearby users are taking up bandwidth. With so many people working from home, reliability from wired connections is crucial.

There are certainly more backend technical issues when adapting an on-premise system to remote work. You may need to reach out to IT developers and cloud hosting providers for some immediate aid.

Compliance with data privacy laws doesn’t stop when agents work from home. Using a compliant service provider, either on-premise or in the cloud, will help maintain customer data protection. You can also update internal policies to ensure employee information is anonymized at the time of entry.

For Calabrio Teleopti WFM customers who are using On-Premise version of our software, connecting to the VPN is needed for certain roles. Anyone who needs to access the Calabrio Teleopti WFM on-premise software will likely require VPN access, but it is important to talk to your local IT group for clarification.

For Calabrio Teleopti WFM customers who are using our cloud offering, VPN access is generally not needed to connect, but may be required in special circumstances. Again, it is recommended you discuss with your local IT for any considerations.

For on-premises deployments of Calabrio ONE, the specific recommendations and requirements for remote agent connectivity to Calabrio ONE will vary by customer. Connectivity requirements are dependent on the recording type and the customers technology components. Customers are encouraged to contact Calabrio Support with questions specific to their implementation.

For Calabrio ONE Cloud customers, there should be no changes required for an employee to access Calabrio ONE when moving from the office to remote.

In a non-Calabrio sense, VPN access may be required to access other critical systems, such as CRMs, billing systems, and other software needed to continue business. It is very likely that your company has put together guidelines that dictate who should use the VPN and who shouldn’t, to keep the bandwidth clear for critical uses.

At the very least, agents must have workstations with updated security patches, and antivirus programs applied. Make sure agents restrict workstation usage to themselves only, limit any personal activity, and enforce reasonable time-outs for sensitive programs. Software-as-a-service programs would also help alleviate some of these manual actions.

You get more flexibility at home with micro-shifts. You don’t have that mid-day hump of overlap with day/night shifts, and you can spread things out better. You should see more efficiency in schedules. Also, take the lack of daily commutes into account. If your agents don’t need to spend 45 minutes in traffic each day, that’s more time available for work.

Allow agents to submit an absence request without validation (call out absence).
Build CRA SQL reports to understand what regions report more call out absences than others. To compensate for high absence, allow for more overtime. Consider loosening up internal policies around overtime, but make sure you’re not breaking any labor laws. Use auto approving overtime requests to be more flexible, no need for supervisors to manually review and approve!

You get more flexibility at home with micro-shifts. You don’t have that mid-day hump of overlap with day/night shifts, and you can spread things out better. You should see more efficiency in schedules. Also, take the lack of daily commutes into account. If your agents don’t need to spend 45 minutes in traffic each day, that’s more time available for work.

As agents transition to remote work, they are likely to have technical issue. Add a higher shrinkage to your forecast to compensate

Make sure you communicate. If you held huddles in person, maintain them if you can. Some people adjust faster than others. It’s okay to feel uncertain about this whole process. That team feeling is not going to go away. Also, make sure your agent calendars are up to date. You can’t just ask something across the room.

Utilize group chat tools, like WebEx, Skype or Microsoft Teams, throughout the day. In the office, you used to be able to turn around and talk to the whole team. Now you must leverage these tools for distance communication.

This is a time to be flexible. Using your workforce tools, like calendars, to manage schedules. If agents need to tend to family or home issues, build it into their schedule. You might have to give a little bit, but agents have more flexibility. Remove the stigma of kids, dogs and doorbells in the background. We’re all dealing with this together.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Any sort of creative scheduling is mandatory, because people aren’t working 9-to5 right now. Throw your current policy out the window and figure out what works best.