6 Signs Spreadsheets Fail as a Workforce Management Tool

Let’s face it. Spreadsheets were made to manage numbers, not people. For scheduling and managing the complexities of a high-demand agent workforce, spreadsheets do not cut it. In fact, they can be a detriment to the effective operations of your contact center.

If you’re struggling with forecasting, scheduling, and monitoring your workforce in real-time, you’re not alone. Playvox Workforce Management has helped countless contact centers around the world modernize their workstreams, eliminate staffing headaches, and optimize workforces. And spreadsheets simply can’t accomplish all of that. 

How can you tell when it’s time to sunset the spreadsheets for a cloud-based, comprehensive workforce management (WFM) tool? Let’s dive in.

What is Workforce Management?

Workforce management is the art and science of having the right number of agents available at the right times to answer an accurately forecasted volume of incoming customer contacts at the service level set by a contact center while minimizing cost.

Managing contact centers efficiently becomes even more important when costs are rising, agents are difficult to hire and retain, and customer service expectations are higher than ever before. Having the right automation tools can help alleviate some of the challenges.

Spreadsheets and WFM: A Love-Hate Relationship

Historically spreadsheets were the only game in town when it came to scheduling, forecasting, and managing call center agents. This worked well enough for voice-only customer support delivery, but the model for delivering outstanding customer experiences (CX) has changed. Ingredients of an optimal CX delivery strategy include:

• Maintaining a customer-centric culture
• Defining the customer journey and putting in place well-designed customer touchpoints
• Delivering consistent quality of service for outstanding customer satisfaction

As contact centers have become increasingly complex and omnichannel in nature, modern service centers require modern solutions. Today, in-person, hybrid, and remote agents handle a variety of channels that operate far differently, requiring a more sophisticated approach to workforce management. 

Struggling to manage unwieldy spreadsheets for scheduling, monitoring, and forecasting? Here are six signs your contact center should replace spreadsheets with a robust workforce management solution.

1. Difficulty with Schedule Adherence

The use of spreadsheets for WFM has several downfalls. A big one is it’s impossible to keep up with all of the manual updates and changes. There is no easy way to keep track of agents adhering to schedules, attendance management, and absence management. Schedule adherence, an important KPI for contact centers, is defined as the amount of time an agent works that coincides with the channel in which they are scheduled to work, including call time, after-contact work, and activities like meetings and training.

Schedule adherence is important for successful forecasting. In an ideal scenario, you would create the perfect schedule from an inbound forecast and hit your expected KPIs for any given day. But that only happens if the schedule is followed as directed — which is what makes schedule adherence and accurate forecasting capabilities such a vital KPI to measure, manage, and improve upon.

Employee scheduling and adherence is a big part of call center performance, because low adherence rates may lead to poor customer service and less-than optimal business processes. For an exceptional customer experience, your contact center needs agents ready to serve customers. Spreadsheets just can’t track how your agents are adhering to their schedule like a workforce management single tool with advanced staff scheduling can.

Related Article: Spreadsheets are to Workforce Management as Dial-Up is to the Internet

2. Poor Line of Sight to Operations

With spreadsheet schedules, you have no easy way to stay on top of what is happening within your campaigns and across communication channels. A limited view means limited opportunities to anticipate (and get ahead of!) organization-wide challenges and conduct accurate forecasting — you cannot improve upon what you can’t see and measure. 

Managing specific service level agreements within your operation is nearly impossible using spreadsheets, as you do not have visibility to how fluctuations in contact volumes are impacting your ability to meet these obligations. Using a workforce management system with real-time reporting in place allows you to set these variables, and the intelligence of the system helps to balance the needs of your requirements. With Playvox WFM with robust reporting, you can view a simple, interactive performance dashboard that covers all the KPIs so you can master planning and performance. These performance dashboards include:

• Service levels
• Shrinkage
• Adherence
• Workstreams
• Occupancy
• Forecast accuracy

3. You’re Overstaffed

In contact centers, the cost of labor is the greatest expense, so it’s critical to optimize your human capital management and optimize employee performance. If you’re encountering problems with contact center staffing, that’s a sign your call center can benefit from a workforce management solution. Overstaffing occurs as a result of an inability to manage changes in demand. To compensate, you may staff up to ensure you have enough contact center agents — even when you don’t need them!

Overstaffing hurts your ROI with excessive costs, loss of efficiency, and low productivity. Conversely, understaffing can negatively impact your ability to meet your customer satisfaction and service level targets. Spreadsheets don’t have the functionality to account for staffing overages and shortages. Does your organization need to do more with less and embrace lean operations? Investing in a comprehensive workforce planning and management solution can make a big impact on the bottom line. These employee performance and management tools can provide answers to questions like:

1. Are your agents able to handle high volumes of interactions efficiently and effectively?
2. What is their utilization rate?
3. Do they have too much idle time in the midst of their daily tasks?
4. Are they overwhelmed with customer interactions?
5. Are there opportunities for additional training and feedback? What’s their true potential? 

 Related Article: WFM from A to Z: Must-Know Contact Center Terms

4. Difficulty Handling Concurrent Interactions

Omnichannel customer experiences are the norm in today’s contact centers. But spreadsheets aren’t equipped to schedule agents based on how many concurrent chats they can handle. The result? Inaccurate forecasting.

Forecasting that incorporates digital channels requires a balancing act of many factors that weren’t an issue in the days of voice-only call centers.

Voice was relatively easy to forecast because it is a synchronous activity. In synchronous communications, multiple parties continually listen for and act upon replies from each other, and agents can only deal with one voice call at a time.

When we look at asynchronous activity such as email interactions, the customer does not expect to receive a response in real time. Sure, there will be a service-level agreement associated with how quickly the contact center responds, but it is very different from a voice interaction.Playvox Workforce Management software has the capability to account for concurrent interactions across multiple channels, unlike spreadsheets and most other products on the market. Forecasting contact volumes becomes simple with a WFM tool’s scheduling and forecasting as key features.

5. Difficulty Scheduling Across Multiple Locations

If you’re struggling to consolidate schedules in a centralized location, a comprehensive workforce management solution may be your answer. Spreadsheets limit an organization’s ability to schedule across multiple contact center locations, and don’t empower contact centers to scale.

Spreadsheets also can’t stand up to the challenges of scheduling a hybrid or remote contact center workforce. But workforce management tools, in contrast, have core features with functionality to coordinate complex schedules across a wide variety of locations.

Centralizing your contact center’s scheduling not only allows you to gain efficiencies on how to create the best staffing plans, but it also enables you to see how each location and remote worker can assist with flexible scheduling to handle interactions from other areas during peak times.

Related Article: 12 Signs Your Contact Center Needs a WEM Solution

6. Shift Swaps Get Messy

When agents want to swap a shift or request time off, do you struggle to identify who is available to cover time off requests and manually handle the changes and scheduling requests? Then it’s time to migrate out of spreadsheets and into a workforce management solution that offers advanced scheduling features and automates administrative tasks for managers.

The right labor management tool or scheduling software allows you to decide if certain shift trades and schedule impacts or changes should be approved automatically, while also giving you a clear view into individual employee adherence issues. That allows you to act on what’s really important and automate the rest.

Talent management, task management, and performance management are challenging for human resources and contact center leaders to balance but critical for effective workforce management. Providing your customer service agents with an easy way to swap shifts and have flexibility with their schedules:

1. Creates a positive work environment
2. Demonstrates cultures of trust and caring
3. Offers more control over agents’ schedules and essential tasks
4. Decreases employee turnover
5. Boosts employee productivity and engagement 

In terms of staffing and employee time, a workforce management all-in-one solution enables you to create a schedule that meets fluctuations in demand and identify new shift opportunities. These could include staggered start times, shorter shifts that cover specific timeframes, and best windows for breaks and agent training. 

Having one place to review your contact center’s scheduling plans and drilling into specific locations or teams can provide you with the insight you need to enhance your scheduling practices. Workforce management software offers key features that enable you to schedule the right agents with the right skills at the right times for each of your locations.

Let’s see a spreadsheet do all of that!

Benefits of a Better Workforce Management Tool

If you’re considering ditching the scheduling, forecasting, and agent management spreadsheet you’re currently using for an artificial intelligence (AI), cloud-based workforce management tool, here are some benefits you stand to gain.

1. Deliver Better Customer Service and Experiences

Today’s customer interactions are often complex, requiring multiple steps and/or staff to solve particular issues. WFM tools with critical line-of-sight visibility and advanced features help contact center leaders ensure that agents have the skills, knowledge, and training to assist with customer needs. This contributes to creating better, consistent support experiences, which pay off in the long run with customer loyalty. A solution such as Playvox WFM with a variety of features including strategic workforce planning capabilities enables you to plan, forecast, and schedule agents for multi-step interactions with AI-powered foresight, helping you keep your budget on track. You are able to get a real-time view of planned vs. actual staff for every location and work type and make adjustments as you go.

2. Empower Your Employees

Staff schedules are never easy — matching up your carefully planned forecast against the very human needs of your employees is tricky to manage and support — especially from within a spreadsheet. Playvox WFM elevates the employee engagement and agent scheduling by supporting shift swaps within the team, as well as time off requests. Set predefined rules, so your agents, WFM schedulers, and customers all win. Give agents access to real-time data so they have a clear understanding about their performance metrics, and where they need to adjust to provide exceptional experiences.

3. Realize Cost Savings

Right-sizing your agent workforce is tricky business. As a contact center leader, you need visibility into how many agents you need at every time. Not understanding this can lead to under or overstaffing, which in turn negatively impacts costs, efficiency, and service delivery. A modern WFM solution can help your organization save money by reducing excess staff salaries and overtime, inefficiencies, and administrative errors.

Bonus Tools

Still unsure if it’s time to parlay your contact center into an automated cloud-based platform or an upgrade from your existing solution? We’ve published a guide that shows you how to retire your spreadsheets and manual processes in favor of a WFM solution that is digital-first, cloud-native, and intuitive. Take the step to eliminate the time, inaccuracy, and costs of manual forecasting and scheduling. Download the eBook “The Dangers of Forecasting and Scheduling with Spreadsheets.”We’ve made it simple for you to calculate your ROI for implementing the Playvox Workforce Management solution. Try it here with three easy steps.