Myth: Market Leading WFM Solutions Improve Service Levels

The enlightened work force manager recognizes that it is impossible for an Erlang based WFM solution to improve upon past service levels. Simply put, the planning inputs to the 100-year old Erlang formulas exclude past indicators of excess demand or long wait times.

This fact about the inadequacies of the competing solutions is ease to test and prove.  What are the inputs for an Erlang forecast? There are only these three:

1)     Historical average call count for the interval

2)     Historical average duration for the interval

3)     Desired service level for the future

Where is the information about past service level, past long wait times? Simply put, it is missing and completely ignored.

What about abandoned calls?  Long wait times don’t translate into abandoned calls when the service is essential or time sensitive. Also, callers who hear a long wait time message tend to hang up prior to the queue—that’s not an abandoned call count. When abandon rates are higher, they usually reflect staffing shortages that have accumulated from earlier periods. If you include these abandon calls, the lesser WFM solution will shift your schedule away from the periods where resources were really needed. The staffing pattern gets worse and the service denial increases. The problems are most serious for businesses that are growing

Competing systems achieve labor utilization by sacrificing service levels and/or denying service. This trade-off is a bi-product of selecting a single staffing level for an entire half-hour. The assumption that calls arrive quite evenly is flawed and distant from reality.

 

 

 

 

 

  Conventional Planning         vs. Reality

 

 

 

 

 

The discrepancy between half-hourly interval planning and reality causes staffing levels to toggle between overstaffing (orange) and understaffing (red).

Advantage HD WFM™ --Improved Granularity

HD WFM™ casts aside the inadequate planning practices that can only harm your call centre’s performance. HD WFM™ understands each and every historical transaction with perfect granularity. These network aware forecasts intricately correct for past underperformance.  The resulting plan compensates precisely for evolving demand patterns.  The intricacies of the plan include exact recognition of skewed calling patterns, long calls that span many intervals, and all forms of service denial including those that occur prior to the ACD queue.

The higher granularity afforded by High Definition Forecasts™ eliminates toggling effects associated with long planning intervals. Improved labor utilization and high service levels are optimized simultaneously.

HD WFM™ is ideal for companies that work with partners because it provides a true global plan for both the demand that is handled internally and the work that is routed to outsourcing partners.