Workforce management (WFM) provides several benefits to agents, including improved focus, additional resources, and valuable assistance.
By Lilith Shoemaker, Staff Writer
As an agent, I understand the customer-facing side of the service experience better than most. WFM gives us agents the ability to bring needs together to improve the customer experience, get the resources we need to do our job well, and achieve the best work-life balance possible.
How?
By providing clear data that the team can use to make educated decisions on how to optimize processes.
1. WFM gives agents more information on what they need to be doing throughout the day
More information means both the managers and the specialists can understand:
- The basics, such as when they are scheduled to work
- Where the team needs extra support or training
- When to ask for help or more resources
- How they are doing so there are no surprises when it comes to professional reviews and 1:1s
- How to take accountability for our work and celebrate our successes together
- What tickets or activities are making specialists want to pull their hair out
- When hiring is needed because there is too much work for people to accomplish
- When reallocation is necessary so you do not have to sit there bored and wait for work
- When team members can take time off without affecting business needs
WFM tools aren’t so much a measure of how you operate as a person or an employee. Think of them instead as a way for the team to think holistically about how your individual needs can be addressed to make the team function like a well-oiled machine. Because that leads to overall success and happiness for us and our customers
2. WFM lets the team understand where we need extra support or training
The expectation here can vary depending on what goals the managers are pushing towards. But for the agents, the knowledge of the team being more focused on productivity will naturally lead to more awareness of how they are doing on a day-to-day basis. Coupled with having consistent opportunities to communicate with managers based on performance data, this gives agents the space to recognize success and growth opportunities with their managers.
Say you walk into a 1:1 and your manager mentions they’d like for you to work on your first response time to ensure customers receive prompt replies. This is an opportunity for the manager to express why this is important and for the specialist to express what would help them achieve this goal. More staffing in the morning to help with the workload, for example. Or, maybe they have the kids in the afternoon and need to work on lower-priority tickets during that time. On the flip side, if your manager is very excited about some recent work you’ve done, you have the space to talk about what is working for you.
Great workforce managers go into 1:1s or coaching sessions with some information from their WFM tool to show specialists. That way, they can see how they are doing and can start relating their work to how well they are contributing to the team’s goals. This is something that can be inspiring to specialists, and it can even be a cause for some team celebrations.
3. WFM empowers agents to ask for help or more resources
With a more open line of communication, we usually see specialists move from reacting to the feedback provided by managers to proactively reaching out when they feel they are not working at a pace to reach the outlined goals. This creates an increased awareness that the team is working together to achieve those objectives, often inspiring specialists to identify areas of opportunity and ask for assistance.
At times, specialists accidentally forget to set their AUX code, resulting in their unproductive time accumulating much longer than anticipated. When this happens, the agent should reach out to the manager and let them know that their tracking is inaccurate due to the mishap. It can be very easy to update to reflect the proper efficiency metrics.
4. WFM prevents surprises in professional reviews and 1:1s
WFM gives us agents the opportunity to check in with our managers regularly to know how we’re doing. That consistency means there are fewer surprises.
It’s great for agents to work with their managers over time on their goals and their action plans for achieving them consistently. It’s much better than getting to the end of the month/quarter/year and getting blindsided in a review because they were under-delivering in an area and didn’t know it.
Example:
One specialist is working with their manager to get their productive hours up, but they have been spending extra time on unproductive tasks reflected in their general task usage. They can communicate this to the manager so that they can adjust expectations for productive time accordingly. At the end of the quarter when they go into their review, they will know confidently that they will have a slightly lower number of productive hours based on the team’s goals.
Rather than being shocked by the fact that they are seemingly “not performing to the standard,” they can feel confident in why.
5. WFM helps agents take accountability for their work and highlights their successes
With consistent communication comes accountability. With the awareness that the team is working towards common goals, specialists tend to start thinking of the bigger picture.
Imagine as a specialist, you start to understand the importance of either working on a ticket or selecting a General Task/Auxcode. With the awareness of setting your work code or working on a ticket, you are telling your managers what you are prioritizing at that time. This allows you to take ownership of your work and see how it affects your overall workflow.
On the other hand, if you’re successfully solving a boatload of tickets, WFM helps to highlight that. So, it’s easier to celebrate the successes you find—you can just point at your scorecard and show off your stellar metrics.
Remember: WFM is a partnership. While it provides clear, actionable reporting for operations to steer business decisions, the communication and data-keeping capabilities also give specialists and agents structure, information, and resources. Specialists can actively engage with their performance metrics, seek assistance when necessary, and justify requests for additional support.
With more teams transitioning to remote work, achieving a healthy work-life balance is paramount. This underscores the importance of utilizing tools to monitor key metrics and KPIs while fostering a workplace culture that prioritizes the well-being of both customers and internal teams.
Post originally published on the Zendesk blog.
