What is Workforce Management?

What Is Workforce Management?

Workforce management, often shortened to WFM, is the set of processes and tools that businesses use to make sure the right number of people with the right skills are working at the right times. In a contact centre context, this means forecasting how many calls, emails, or chat sessions you expect to receive, then scheduling agents so you have enough staff to handle the demand without overspending on labour.

It sounds straightforward, but getting it right is genuinely difficult. Schedule too few agents and customers wait on hold, get frustrated, and hang up. Schedule too many and you are paying people to sit idle. Workforce management is the discipline of finding the sweet spot.

How Workforce Management Works

A typical workforce management process has three main stages: forecasting, scheduling, and real-time management.

Forecasting

Everything starts with predicting demand. How many calls will come in next Monday between 10am and 11am? What about the first week of January, when post-holiday enquiries spike? WFM analysts look at historical data -- call volumes, average handling times, seasonal trends, marketing campaigns, even weather patterns -- to build forecasts that are as accurate as possible.

Good forecasting is part science, part art. The data gives you a baseline, but you also need to account for one-off events like product launches, billing cycles, or system outages that can cause sudden surges in contact volume.

Scheduling

Once you know how many agents you need at each interval throughout the day, you build schedules that match those requirements. This involves balancing several competing needs: customer demand, agent preferences, contractual obligations, skill coverage, and labour regulations like working time directives.

Modern WFM software automates much of this, generating optimised schedules that minimise costs while meeting service level targets. But the best systems also allow agents to have some input -- swapping shifts, requesting time off, or picking up extra hours -- which improves morale and reduces absence rates.

Real-Time Management

No forecast is perfect, so WFM teams need to monitor what is actually happening throughout the day and adjust on the fly. If call volumes spike unexpectedly, you might pull agents from offline tasks like training or email and move them onto the phones. If things are quieter than expected, you might offer voluntary early finishes or schedule coaching sessions.

Why Workforce Management Matters for Businesses

Labour is typically the largest cost in any contact centre, often accounting for 60 to 70 per cent of the total operating budget. Even small improvements in scheduling efficiency can save significant amounts of money. A 5 per cent improvement in schedule adherence might save a 200-seat contact centre hundreds of thousands of pounds per year.

But it is not just about cost. Workforce management directly affects customer experience. The industry-standard service level target -- answering 80 per cent of calls within 20 seconds -- only works if you have enough agents available. Miss that target consistently and your customer satisfaction scores will suffer, complaints will rise, and customers will start looking elsewhere.

Agent wellbeing also depends on good workforce management. Nobody wants to work in an environment where they are constantly overwhelmed with back-to-back calls and no time to breathe. Equally, agents get bored and disengaged when there is not enough work to keep them busy. Good WFM practices create a balanced workload that keeps people productive without burning them out.

Workforce Management and Telephone Payments

When your contact centre handles phone payments, workforce management takes on an additional dimension. Payment calls tend to take longer than general enquiries because agents need to follow specific compliance scripts, wait for customers to enter card details, and confirm transaction outcomes. If your WFM forecasts do not account for the longer handling time of payment calls, you will understaff those periods and create bottlenecks.

There is also a skills component. Not every agent may be authorised to handle payments, especially if your business requires specific training or certification. Your scheduling needs to ensure that payment-trained agents are available during peak payment periods -- which might not coincide with peak general enquiry periods.

Practical Considerations

• Invest in good data. Your forecasts are only as good as the historical data you feed them. Make sure your systems capture accurate call volume, handling time, and after-call work data.
• Do not over-optimise. Schedules that look perfect on paper often fail in practice because they leave no room for the unexpected. Build in a small buffer.
• Involve your agents. People are more likely to stick to schedules they had some say in creating.
• Review your forecasts regularly. If your forecast accuracy is consistently below 95 per cent, something needs adjusting.
• Consider shrinkage carefully. Agents are not available for 100 per cent of their scheduled time -- they take breaks, attend meetings, and have system downtime. A realistic shrinkage allowance is typically 25 to 35 per cent.

Workforce management might not be glamorous, but it is one of the highest-impact disciplines in any contact centre operation. Get it right and everything else gets easier.