Workforce Management: The Agent Self Service Revolution
(First in a Two Part Series)
By Daryl Gonos
Sr. Partner & Co-founder

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Workforce management technology has faced some big challenges over the past decade. The rapid adoption of skills based routing demanded changes to traditional Erlang C calculations. Multi-media created a new set of service level metrics and interface challenges. No developments though, in my opinion, have increased the value of workforce management software and changed the way it is perceived more than agent self service capabilities.

Agents can complete some or all of the following transactions on many of the most common workforce management platforms. They can complete them from their station desktop, from home, from a kiosk set up in the center or in some cases over the phone via speech recognition.

Retrieve their schedule
Process Bids
Submit a request for shift change
Drop a shift
Pick up available posted shifts.
Request a shift trade with another employee.
Request Vacation
Notify illness or late time
Check their availability
Check their entitlements
View history of their transactions
Review business rules

All of this functionality, on most platforms, is provided through a web browser. And since almost everyone knows how to use a browser there is not much required in terms of agent training. Functionality, obviously, will differ by provider but any portion of this capability that is on the table can be greatly exploited. Let's look at the some of the ramifications of agent self service.

Workforce management - demystified

Workforce management software and the people who have used it, up to this point, have resided in a silo. The systems themselves have been somewhat of a mystery to most people with all that "Art and Science" jazz. This leads most people to the conclusion that since they are neither an artist nor a scientist, they could not possibly understand workforce management. That is just not true and frankly it is not that hard to understand or master. Workforce management to most agents was a piece of paper that came from a computer that ultimately, dictated their lives. Those perceptions have been altered forever by self service that benefits not only agents, but analysts, the center, the customers and the bottom line.

The impact of self service is greatly felt and probably most appreciated by the agents. They are, for the first time, given control and even responsibility for managing their schedule within the guidelines of the center. The schedules are still optimized so do not worry that you are losing control. Agent self service fully supports optimization efforts.

Agents can make decisions with their spouses and families about how and when they work and when they go on vacation. They are empowered. There are probably agents today that would not work in a contact center that did not enable them in this way. By "pushing" these tasks out to the agents the vendors have turned the agents into workforce managers. They can feel and touch workforce management software for the first time and it is demystified and even their friend. The agents themselves are supporting the plan of the managers and analysts and enjoying it in the process. Agent empowerment through self service improves moral, reducing turnover and improves recruiting efforts. The effect is an increase in call center productivity and is just the tip the iceberg.

Process standardization

A significant benefit of agent self service is the immediate standardization of policies and procedures related to all agent activities supported by the system. In many cases, in manual environments, decisions about sick time and late time are made differently across centers, across scheduled groups and even across supervisors in the same groups.

The business rules that are imbedded in the self service modules standardize practices. For instance, if an agent wants to swap a shift with another agent and they lack the appropriate skill set, they will not be permitted to complete that transaction. If they are requesting vacation and they have not accrued enough time, the requests will not even be considered. If an agent tries to swap a shift and they have already met the user designated threshold of three per month, the trade will not be permitted.

The transaction processes and even the approval processes or business rules are imbedded in the system. The point is that the processes are based on your unique culture. It also requires that prior to deployment that each center must be able to articulate what each of their policies are for the various functions supported by agent self service. This is a healthy exercise for any call center. Note also that by creating standards and automating the approval process a center can eliminate subjectivity and favoritism. That is a bone of contention in many teams. Do not worry if you do not wish to automate some approval process, you can force involvement by a supervisor or manager as required. The implications of this are that your processes have to be well thought out prior to deploying this functionality.

Administrative time savings

Agent self service transactions are integrated immediately into the workforce management application. Consider the mechanisms and methodologies in place for centers that have not upgraded their solutions to support agent self service. Exception management is critical to workforce management planners. Workforce managers are responsible for entering all the planned and unplanned deviations from the schedule, I.E. exceptions, vacation, etc request that they get via paper, via email, via phone call, even from supervisors walking up to their desk. These highly paid analysts spend 75 percent of their day in data entry so that their schedules and future plans accurately reflect what is actually happening in the center. It is stacks of paper, email files and error after miscommunication after error. The savings administratively and the reduction in errors are, on their own, more than justification to invest in self service.

Time savings occurs as well in another way. In fully deployed agent self service worlds if an agent wants to know how much sick or vacation time they have available, they can access it themselves. They do not need to ask anyone and they can even do it on their own time if they have web access from home

The processes for managing for sick time, late time, jury duty, vacation accrual are mostly paper driven. Agent self service eliminates all those cumbersome models. The highly paid analyst now actually has time to analyze. It is, for the users of workforce management systems, an amazing transformation in their job description.

Large contact centers should also expect a reduction in headcount to manage all of these processes that were previously manual in orientation and paper driven. You would be shocked to see just how many man hours are associated with the varying task that agent self service delivers.