A shift to asynchronous channels
The world of Workforce Management (WFM) is continually evolving to fit a changing world. Instead of contact center work being done primarily via the telephone, more and more companies are seeing an increase in service and sales requests through asynchronous channels, such as chat and text messaging. This evolution was driven, at least in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought these new communication channels to the forefront, according to Nathan Stearns, Vice President of Workforce Engagement Management Product Strategy at NICE. These changes in communication styles put pressure on the WFM community, as most industry practices are built around synchronous communication styles. The problem is that asynchronous communication leaves room for pauses, increasing the overall “life cycle” of each interaction while providing an opportunity to handle multiple interactions concurrently.
“The challenge to the WFM process is that asynchronous work has embedded pauses,” Stearns said. “For example, if an employee is helping a customer on a chat or an SMS, there are pauses between asking a customer for more information and the customer responding with an answer. While waiting for the response, the employee is idle and potentially doing nothing productive.”
These pauses are often long (several minutes or even hours) and therefore introduce new challenges for keeping track of the work effort required to resolve customer interactions. The work effort for phone calls are easy to track since they have an obvious start and end time and the employee is interacting synchronously (continuously and contiguously with little to no pausing). Chat or text messaging is much more complicated, as these interactions may take hours (or days) waiting for a customer’s response. This waiting period opens up the opportunity for inefficiency in employees’ work flows. To track actual efficiency in asynchronous environments, Stearns highlights the importance of understanding the true work effort that goes into a particular interaction – a process referred to as True to Interval.
“True to Interval has two components. The first is the analysis of “in-focus” handle time versus “elapsed” handle time. The elapsed handle time is the start-to-finish time of the lifecycle of the interaction from the customer perspective. The in-focus handle time is the true work effort expended to resolve the interaction. In-focus handle time is the perspective needed for accurate workforce planning because it is the work effort that went into a piece of work,” Stearns said. “One of the challenges we have is separating the two perspectives of time. Both are important to understand. But for workforce management, we need to zero in on the work effort, which is the in-focus handle time.”
According to Stearns, the second component of True to Interval is the change of paradigm to report work effort time in each interval where work occurred, rather than waiting to report the sum of the work effort time in the single interval when a work item ends. This is a major shift in how WFM systems traditionally deal with time reporting. The traditional method of waiting until something ends before receiving work effort results has led to significant inaccuracies when planning for long duration work items. “This is why we've reengineered the NICE WFM system to look at things through a new lens, which we call True to Interval.”
By understanding the True to Interval work effort, an organization can better plan for future staffing needs to improve efficiency and the customer experience.
Bringing a new understanding to the back office.
Most companies operate the front office (or call center) and the back office separately. Yet, there are downtimes and unexpected surges of work in both offices. Stearns noted that since it is possible to adjust staffing levels to meet the needs of synchronous communications, it is wholly possible to use those same practices within the back office, where work is often asynchronous. By combining both front office and back office teams, an organization can shuffle team members around based on the needs of both organizations.
“We have a sense that there is an opportunity to gain efficiencies if we can bring these two dissimilar workstreams together and determine how to interweave them,” Stearns said. “We believe we can take advantage of the peaks and valleys of both environments and drive new efficiencies across the entire enterprise.”
Skill-based routing already takes place in contact centers, where people are pulled from voice calls to live chat or vice-versa. In merging with the back office or with asynchronous digital channels, this same practice can be used: downtimes in either office can be leveraged to get work done in the other office. But, there is a challenge in combining the front office and back office, which is the length of the planning interval that the two environments typically use. Contact centers typically operate on a 15 to 30-minute planning interval since the nature of the work lies in urgency. The back office, on the other hand, operates on more of a one-day to one-week interval.
“We had to find a way to deconstruct back office workstreams that use a long planning interval into the lowest common denominator of planning intervals,” Stearns explained’ “which is the contact center 15 or 30-minute planning interval, so that we can help our customers interweave the work across the entire enterprise to take advantage of the idle time, the peaks and valleys, and the sharing of employee’s time and talents.”
Solutions for merging back and front offices
NICE offers a True to Interval paradigm that deconstructs individual synchronous and asynchronous work items into the work effort required to complete the work items across multiple small planning intervals. By using this paradigm, long duration back office and digital work items can be broken down into intervals used for planning in conjunction with the front office.
Additionally, NICE WFM’s Inventory Insights allows managers to transform these interval-specific work efforts into more meaningful workload estimates at longer planning intervals typical of back office and digital contact centers. Inventory Insights determines whether staffing levels are adequate to maintain a healthy backlog, even when sharing resources across the front office and the back office. Inventory Insights automates the forecasting of inventory backlog and expiration for both blended and dedicated operations. This data is used to convert work activities into turnaround time estimates for each work item, allowing the back office to analyze inventory data and predictions in various time frames (from 15 minutes to a full week) to gain new insights into deferrable work held in the backlog.
Both the True to Interval and Inventory Insights features help optimize the WFM process throughout the front and back office – keeping operations efficient and effective.
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