Does your WFM solution provide real-time insights in absence or sickness?

One of the most challenging and recurring tasks in a contact center, is ensuring that enough agents are available to handle actual call volume throughout the day. Overstaffing adds unnecessary costs while understaffing creates customer service issues such as longer wait times for calls to be handled.

At present, Workforce Management applications do not fully address unanticipated agent absenteeism.

There are three key reasons for this:

1. The burden of optimizing intraday staffing levels falls into the hands of contact center operations department, who have the responsibility to monitor intraday staffing variances and take corrective actions to address understaffing or overstaffing situations.
2. The time pressure to analyse staffing variances, determine corrective actions, contact agents and update schedules makes this a highly stressful and challenging role.
3. Activities such as reaching off-shift agents and request them to come into work and convincing on-shift agents to do overtime takes considerable effort without the guarantee of successful outcomes.

As a consequence, over 70% of workforce administration resources are typically focused on intraday management activities. Adding to the stress are the reporting sickness absence policies, which are in place in most companies. These policies cause excessive manual administrative overhead and adds to your operating cost.

In most companies, agents report absence by phone, via a centrally managed HR desk. The HR helpdesk manually administers the agent absence into a central HR system and sends an email and/or notification to the contact center operations department. The contact center operations department manually administers the sickness or too late into the WFM application to gain insights and start analysing understaffing impact and take corrective actions.

This absence process involves a lot of manual work and causes delays before the agent absence is known at the contact center operations team. This alone increases stress and additional work by reaching out to agents who are “only” late.

What if your agents can initiate their absence strait into your WFM application?

With a Mobile Engagement solution, such as Komyunity, you can. There are three key benefits you get when using this solution:

• Your contact center operations team have immediately insights into the absence of your agents. If an employee is late, your operations team does not have to take additional corrective understaffing actions because they immediately know that the agent is only late, and not sick.

• In case of sickness, the WFM operations team can immediately take corrective actions which reduces the impact on service levels and reduces the stress on operations team. A key advantage is the significant reduction in administrative overhead regarding absence administration.

• Many companies require reporting absence via a central HR desk. This is mainly due to their internal absence policy regulations. With the Komyunity solution, this also can be facilitated. Your agents will now have the ability to contact the central HR helpdesk directly from their mobile app without having to remember phone-numbers and email addresses.

• Most companies also require a validation call in case of sickness. Contacting agents is often based on decentral managed spreadsheets with contact details of the agents. These contact lists are difficult to keep up to date and requires additional time of your WFM operations team or supervisors. With the Komyunity solution contact details of the agents are stored centrally. In this way, the WFM operations team and supervisors have an accurate overview of the contact details of all agents to smoothen the absence process even further.

Reducing the administrative overhead and lead time of reporting absence, reduces intraday management activities and stress of the contact centers operations team.

The Komyunity solution will be highly appreciated by your contact center operations team, but there are many benefits for agents as well. Reporting lateness and sickness directly into your Workforce Management application gives contact center operations team real-time insights in absence of the workforce. It is no longer a manual administrative process and therefore, is easier, faster, cheaper and reduces stress.

To learn more about the komyunity mobile workforce management application, visit www.komyunity.com and download your copy of the Komyunity e-book today.