What is Contact Center Workforce Planning?

Contact center workforce planning is the process of forecasting staffing needs - i.e., how many agents are needed - based on estimated contact volume, and then hiring, training and scheduling them. This is also known as workforce management (WFM).

Contact center workforce management teams are always performing a balancing act between overstaffing, which is great for wait times but bad for the bottom line, and understaffing, which usually degrades the customer experience. Scheduling is a complex function,especially in contact centers supporting multiple channels. Forecasting and scheduling were once manual tasks performed by spreadsheet wizards, but automation has revolutionized the way contact center workforce management is performed.

Contact center workforce management is performed every day. Workforce managers are continuously adjusting staffing plans to account for agent attrition, changes in contact volume, and much more. These events also trigger a need to adjust agent schedules. Workforce management continues to increase in complexity as more channels are introduced and many agents become skilled across various channels. Contact center workforce management software makes forecasting across all these channels less complex, and makes the creation and adjustment of schedules straightforward and easy.