RINGCENTRAL CONTACT CENTRE
Workforce Management
Feature Overview
What if there was a way to integrate all of your internal business processes for total operational efficiency and employee productivity?
Well, thanks to new technologies, there is.
A WFM or workforce management solution offers just that. An integrated approach to WFM involves forecasting labour requirements and managing staff and day-to-day tasks more effectively.
Feature Overview
What if there was a way to integrate all of your internal business processes for total operational efficiency and employee productivity?
Well, thanks to new technologies, there is.
A WFM or workforce management solution offers just that. An integrated approach to WFM involves forecasting labour requirements and managing staff and day-to-day tasks more effectively.
What is workforce management?
Workforce management (WFM) is an overarching term used to describe the management of various different internal processes. Processes such as workforce planning and analytics, leave management, talent management, human capital management (HCM), and accurate scheduling. All of these are crucial for the efficient and effective running of a productive workforce.
At its heart, workforce management is what organisations do in order to make sure the right person is always assigned to the right task at the right time. Why? Because that’s the best way to guarantee that demand will be consistently met by your workforce.
Workforce management tools exist to enhance the WFM process. These automated tools allow teams to view schedules, request changes, manage absences, run training, and more of those kinds of crucial human resources tasks.
Not only does this make for a more organised workplace with more efficient outputs, but it also contributes massively to increasing team morale and satisfaction.
Benefits of WFM software
WFM software is specifically designed to streamline the entire workforce management process with easy and effective forecasting, scheduling, and data-led insights at your fingertips. These tools use automation and artificial intelligence to automate management processes so that the day-to-day running of any workforce can be executed within one intuitive platform.
Specific benefits include:
Make more informed decisions with the support of data-led insights. WFM solutions reduce a workforce manager’s likelihood of misjudging staffing requirements. You’ll be able to improve customer satisfaction, promote corporate responsibility, improve your resource planning, and gain detailed insights over time.
WFM software will:
- Respond to demand fluctuations
- Reallocate resources as necessary
- Provide detailed reporting (SLA, abandon rates, etc.).
Manual processes are a drain on productivity. By aligning demand volumes and available resources more accurately, WFM promises increased efficiency and optimised customer experiences across all relevant channels.
Automated WFM saves time by:
- Eliminating manual data entry
- Minimising human error
- Reducing productivity lost to juggling disparate systems
- Freeing employees to focus on what matters
When WFM is optimised you can effectively plan for the future and make more informed business decisions. You’ll be able to see the direct impact of each management decision on your workforce. Plan for capacity, profitability, and optimum service.
WFM can help you plan for the future with:
- Business performance metrics—collect and analyse business data and projections.
- Productivity analysis—are your teams underperforming, at capacity, or stretched?
- Skills analysis—assess your team's skills and fill in the gaps to prevent future issues.
Manual scheduling is nothing short of a nightmare. Automated scheduling with the help of smart algorithms will shave a mountain of time off your day-to-day chores and ensure increased accuracy in the process.
WFM software uses real-time analysis to help you:
- Optimise schedules and skills
- Access a real-time feed of scheduled tasks
- Eliminate underutilised time
- Reduce impact of unforeseen changes
- Practice skill-based deployment
At the end of the day, all of this boils down to service. An efficient, productive, well-managed workforce is going to deliver a far superior service to your customers.
WFM improves service levels by:
- Historical forecasting—to create accurate staffing forecasts.
- Making employees happier—happy employees deliver a better service.
- Eliminating coverage gaps—thanks to data-driven scheduling.
With RingCentral’s cloud solutions you’ll be able to align your entire team under actionable goals and manage your employees sustainably. Day to day, hour to hour.
Workforce expectations are changing, and that means the way we manage our teams needs to change too. Here’s what RingCentral had to say about it at Elite Business Live:
How does workforce management work?
But how does all of this actually work?
Workforce Management is all about overseeing a company’s entire workforce from the individual employee to the big-picture outlook. Workforce managers are in charge of managing processes, finances, production, service provision, appointments, and negotiations.
Now, that’s a lot for a single person to manage using manual processes alone.
WFM really comes into its own when the workforce manager’s role is supported by a fully integrated WFM suite. WFM tools support the workforce manager with real-time data collection, management, forecasting, budgeting, scheduling, and analysis.
What is workforce management in a call centre?
Though workforce management can be utilised across all industries and business types, it remains a process closely aligned with call centre and contact centre management. This is because the everyday running of a call centre is heavily reliant on precision scheduling.
When running a call centre you naturally want to ensure that the volume of work matches the number (and skill level) of the agents you’ve assigned that day, shift, or hour.
Running a contact centre is a delicate balance between efficiency, cost, and quality. So implementing the right workforce management system is very important indeed.
When call centres get their workforce management just right, they can expect a boost to their ROI, increased employee and customer satisfaction, plus robust and sustainable workflows.
Workforce management processes
WFM isn’t a linear process. It comprises multiple contributing management processes, all of which are essential to its overall efficacy.
From demand forecasting to budgeting, scheduling to assignments, every piece of the puzzle must fit just right.
Demand forecasting
Demand forecasting is an essential part of any workforce management agenda. Workforce managers must accurately predict present and future workloads and staff their contact centres accordingly.
Accurate forecasting can be achieved by looking at historical data and calculating the amount of resources that will be needed in order to satisfy anticipated demand.
Budgeting
Next comes budgeting. Budgeting is incredibly important for any business. For contact centres, managers must staff their centres to a sufficient capacity to both satisfy demand and remain profitable. WFM suites help workforce managers to access data-driven demand forecasts so that they can optimise their staffing deployment and balance workloads cost-effectively.
Performance management
Workforce management also takes into account employee engagement. Why? Because engagement is key to maintaining high levels of performance.
When employees are engaged they are more focussed and more productive. It’s important to keep tabs on both individual and team performance so that your employee’s skills can be utilised most effectively.
Payroll management
Managing the payroll manually is time-consuming. WFM automates payroll management to save you time and reduce human error. WFM suites will generate custom reports and process payroll quickly with instant payment options, shift payments, timesheets, and more.
Employee scheduling
Let’s talk about scheduling. For many of us, scheduling has long felt like a bit of a stab in the dark. Without a highly accurate forecast it can be hard to account for all eventualities. That’s where WFM comes in.
Once you’ve generated your demand forecasts you’ll be able to accurately define hours and shifts to your employees. Automated scheduling tools can even factor in additional factors such as individual agent skill sets, work rules, and calendar entries (e.g. holidays, absences, etc.).
Planned training
Training is an essential part of workforce management. When your agents know exactly what they’re doing, your contact centre will run like clockwork. WFM is the best way to train your employees without too much added disruption.
You’ll be able to schedule training sessions alongside your usual workflows so everything keeps running smoothly. WFM tools built-in to your communications solutions, too, make it easier to share training materials like guidebooks or white papers.
Time & attendance tracking
Predict changes in demand with robust time and attendance tracking. WFM tools use time tracking software solutions to help companies assess attendance patterns, combat absenteeism, and anticipate any potential coverage gaps ahead of time.
Compliance
Last but certainly not least, WFM tools offer robust compliance tracking. Ensuring that your operation is legally compliant is so important.
Failing to comply with legislation can result in fines or even legal action. But keeping on top of compliance issues can be taxing. WFM software does it for you and notifies you immediately of any discrepancies if they arise.
Which industries can benefit from workforce management?
All industries and sectors can benefit from workforce management processes and tools. WFM is ideal for any organisation that has a contact centre in operation.
Examples include:
Why businesses are choosing RingCentral as their WFM solution
When the time comes to find your own WFM solution, it’s important to make it a good choice. Not all WFM suites are made equal and not all of them will be right for you.
Look for a WFM software that will address the issues that are specifically pertinent to your contact centre.
RingCentral Engage approaches WFM holistically. With RingCentral, you’ll benefit from the WFM approach plus comprehensive business phone features and functionalities.
Features such as…
- Skills based routing
- Call recording
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
- Live data & analytics
- Omnichannel support
- Virtual assistants
- Top-quality integrations
- Automated bots
With RingCentral’s cloud-based, integrated workforce management software, you’ll be able to forecast across all important variables and precisely calculate your anticipated workload based on real-time and historical data.
You’ll be able to see exactly what’s happening in your contact centre at any given time. Giving you the freedom to monitor wait times, call queues, and even conduct sentiment analysis in order to continually work towards optimising your consumer experiences.
Plus, since RingCentral is based in the cloud, it doesn’t matter whether you’re managing an in-house, remote or hybrid team. Your targeted insights can be derived and applied everywhere, anywhere, anytime.
To round it off, RingCentral also has access to enterprise-grade telephony solutions across voice, messaging, and video. Because, after all, ease of communication is essential for any well-executed workforce management process.
Workforce management case study
Take Ooredoo, for example. The company uses RingCentral Engage Digital to deliver and manage their digital customer services at scale.
Ooredoo’s aim was to create a customer experience that aligned with changing consumer habits. In the past, the company had been managing their customer support on email and phone only. Ooredoo’s team were not able to track customer queries that came in from other channels such as Facebook.
The company needed a better way to track activity and optimise their management of employee-consumer interactions across multiple channels. Engage Digital offered an omnichannel approach that allowed Ooredo to manage their customer comments, and address them via live chatbots in real-time.
Related features
Outbound Call Centre
With RingCentral’s Outbound Call Centre you’ll step up your productive outreach. This outbound campaign management system allows you to upsell, cross-sell, collect data, and promote with dynamic outbound contact centre management functionalities.
With personalised agent scripting and efficient outbound dialers, you’ll speed up lead generation and set your agents up for success.
Collaborative Contact Centre
With RingCentral’s Collaborative Contact Centre, you can transform your customer services for faster issue resolution and seriously happy customers.
RingCentral’s Cloud Contact Centre offers omnichannel customer routing, robust CRM software integrations, agent management tools, and targeted, actionable call centre reporting and analytics. Empower your agents and start solving service issues quicker than ever before.
Omnichannel services
RingCentral offers users truly omnichannel services so that you can communicate with your clients and teams on their channel of choice. That could be via call, messaging, SMS-based support, social media communication, or good old-fashioned email.
Inbound Call Centre
With RingCentral’s Inbound Call Centre, you can connect callers quickly and accurately first-time around. RingCentral will help you get those first-time resolution rates soaring with intelligent inbound call routing, skills-based routing, and access to top native integrations with leading CRMs.
Workforce optimisation
Optimise your entire workforce with Workforce Optimisation Pro for RingCentral Contact Centre.
Complete with performance management, quality management, speech analytics, and more, you’ll be able to oversee and moderate your entire workforce under one roof.
Workforce management case study
Take Ooredoo, for example. The company uses RingCentral Engage Digital to deliver and manage their digital customer services at scale.
Ooredoo’s aim was to create a customer experience that aligned with changing consumer habits. In the past, the company had been managing their customer support on email and phone only. Ooredoo’s team were not able to track customer queries that came in from other channels such as Facebook.
The company needed a better way to track activity and optimise their management of employee-consumer interactions across multiple channels. Engage Digital offered an omnichannel approach that allowed Ooredo to manage their customer comments, and address them via live chatbots in real-time.
Related features
Outbound Call Centre
With RingCentral’s Outbound Call Centre you’ll step up your productive outreach. This outbound campaign management system allows you to upsell, cross-sell, collect data, and promote with dynamic outbound contact centre management functionalities.
With personalised agent scripting and efficient outbound dialers, you’ll speed up lead generation and set your agents up for success.
Collaborative Contact Centre
With RingCentral’s Collaborative Contact Centre, you can transform your customer services for faster issue resolution and seriously happy customers.
RingCentral’s Cloud Contact Centre offers omnichannel customer routing, robust CRM software integrations, agent management tools, and targeted, actionable call centre reporting and analytics. Empower your agents and start solving service issues quicker than ever before.
Omnichannel services
RingCentral offers users truly omnichannel services so that you can communicate with your clients and teams on their channel of choice. That could be via call, messaging, SMS-based support, social media communication, or good old-fashioned email.
Inbound Call Centre
With RingCentral’s Inbound Call Centre, you can connect callers quickly and accurately first-time around. RingCentral will help you get those first-time resolution rates soaring with intelligent inbound call routing, skills-based routing, and access to top native integrations with leading CRMs.
Workforce optimisation
Optimise your entire workforce with Workforce Optimisation Pro for RingCentral Contact Centre.
Complete with performance management, quality management, speech analytics, and more, you’ll be able to oversee and moderate your entire workforce under one roof.
Learn more about RingCentral’s capabilities in our demo below.
Frequently asked questions
- Workforce analysis or planning is the process of analysing and acting upon contact centre data. That data is then used to make decisions pertaining to things like recruitment, employee retention, and employee management practices moving forward.
- Many different elements go into workforce planning. Typical components include: Forecasting, succession planning, leadership development, recruiting, employee retention strategies, redeployment strategies, retirement planning.
- Workforce planning is extremely important as it ensures that there will always be sufficient and adequately skilled staff available to deliver the company’s services.
- In the context of a call centre, workforce management is all about assigning the right number of agents, with the right skills, at the right time. It’s about balancing employee availability with forecasted demand and scheduling considerations. This ensures that high-quality services are consistently delivered at all times.
What is workforce management (WFM) and how does it work?
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