Workforce management is one of the most critical functions in a contact centre, so it is important to ensure everyone on the team has the skills and knowledge they need to be successful.

This Real-Time WFM for Contact Centre Analysts training course is specifically designed for Real-Time Analysts (RTAs) in a Contact Centre to ensure they have the tools they need to make better decisions, encourage more efficient planning, and improve your customers’ experience.

It covers everything from workforce planning fundamentals to tracking and analysis, as well as what needs to be considered when things don’t go according to plan, such as adjusting rosters, break times, queue allocations, and so on.

In larger contact centres, the Real-Time Analyst is typically a dedicated role (or roles).

If you work in a smaller centre and have to wear multiple hats, we recommend the Workforce Management Essentials training course, which covers everything you need to know about WFM.

Finally, the principles and techniques taught in this course are vendor-agnostic and do not depend on the type/brand of WFM software you use.

A fundamental component of Workforce Management is forecasting/predicting future customer demand and aligning your rosters (start/finish times, breaks, annual leave) to maximise your resources during your busiest periods of the day/week/month/year.

But even despite the best plans in the world, things don’t always go to plan!

Sick leave, traffic delays, urgent training requirements, and higher than forecasted volumes due to external events (e.g., media, weather, etc.), plus your own business activities (marketing, product issues, etc.) can all wreak havoc!

Real-time analysts will analyse the situation (and data) and make decisions or recommendations to maximise the business and customer outcomes with the resources you have available, all while also trying to balance staff preferences with shift and break times – sounds easy, right???!!!

With over 70% of contact centre operating costs being related to personnel, it is critical to ensure the right number of staff are in place to optimise the customer experience.

You will gain an understanding of what workforce management is; why it is so important and the challenges that organisations face when trying to optimise the customer experience.

We will cover:

1. Defining a contact centre
2. What workforce management is
3. The workforce management lifecycle
4. The role of workforce planning

As a Real-Time Analyst is it important to understand the basics of workforce management.

In this module, we provide insight into the importance of workforce planning. This includes an overview of forecasting and scheduling as well as why multi-skilling is important.

We will cover:

1. Forecasting- gathering and analysing data.
2. Understanding service level goals and creating basic forecasts
3. Multi-skilling
4. Analysing shrinkage
5. Calculating how many staff you need in each interval of the day.
6. Scheduling – building schedules that balance customer service requirements and meeting service level goals with the scheduling preferences of your staff

Once the plan has been created, it’s important to track what is happening and analyse the results. As an RTA, this is one of the primary tasks.

Real-Time Analysts will learn what they need to be looking at and how to spot any variances from what was planned.

We will cover:

1. What to measure
2. When to measure it
3. Understanding the impact of a variance to the plan

Even with the best planning, things change. Events happen that can increase or decrease customer demand, schedules change and RTA’s need to take actions to try to ensure the best and most consistent service outcome.

The final module covers why intervention is often required; how to manage exceptions; when to re-forecast and how best to provide recommendations to the business.

We will cover:

1. Why intervention is important
2. Exception management
3. How and when to intervene
4. Re-forecasting
5. Service level consistency
6. Providing recommendations to the business.