How can you leverage WFM to make quick-and-easy wins for your return on investment (ROI)? I’d like to share a couple of quick-and-easy, real-world scenarios that immediately will turn into wins for your contact center.

Shave the Payroll!
Assume that everyone in your 100-agent contact center works a 40-hour work week. How often do you actually need all of your agents working all 40 hours every week? My guess is that it is probably not all the time.

What if you were to set up your WFM solution to give a range of hours between 38 and 40 hours? Shaving a mere two hours a week across half of your agents quickly turns into significant payroll savings: 2 hours per week x 50% of your agents x $15/hour x 52 weeks = $78,000 of payroll savings per year.

Evaluate Forecasted Demand vs. Vacation Allotment
Most contact centers only allow a blanket number of hours for PTO on any given day, without giving much thought to whether or not the number actually corresponds to the forecast. For example, your forecast may call for a significantly fewer number of hours in the first week of the month as compared to the last week of the month. Are you taking advantage of that lull in your call volume by allowing more vacation in the first week than in the last week of the month?

Now look at your forecasted demand and see if you can’t bump those vacation allotment numbers up. Not only will this allow you to target your forecast that much more accurately but your agents will benefit. How? Simply by being able to take that additional time to re-charge their batteries with some time off.

Be on the Lookout for Part-Timers
Part-timers can be a gold mine for properly staffed contact centers – if used correctly. Ask your agents if anyone is interested in a part-time, flexible schedule. Set up the agent preferences module so part-time agents can enter in their requirements and then let the scheduler do the work.

There will likely be agents who prefer working according to a fixed, part-time schedule but the likelihood is just as great that agents are willing to be flexible on a week-to-week basis, thus allowing the scheduling team to use them to fill in gaps without committing to an excess of hours.

This is just a small sample of approaches that a contact center can take to tackle the problem of wasted payroll. I hope you will find them useful.

What are some things that have worked for you? Please share them with us. I’m looking forward to it!