The Impact of E-commerce on Workforce Management
by Daryl A. Gonos & Todd A. Cotharin

The new channels (i.e. web chat, email) into the call center are making the job of the workforce manager even more complex. This new consideration, layered upon sophisticated skills based routing, is creating even greater confusion for those seeking to purchase workforce management software and those who are trying to integrate the new channels into existing workforce management configurations.

Letıs take a look at some of the issues surrounding tasks such as e-mail and web chat as they relate to workforce management system vendors and workforce managers. There have been a few announcements from the vendor community involving strategic relationships with the providers of e-mail management systems and the integration of the channel into the workforce management mix. Kana and E-gain have teamed up with Blue Pumpkin. Aspect has announced the capability as part of the Aspect SeriesFive, eWorkforce management software into the Aspect Customer Relationship Portal. The announcements themselves stress the importance of addressing these channels without really discussing the methodology. This article presents what we believe are the critical issues.

E-mail presents a different challenge to the traditional workforce management system model on a variety of levels. There is, first, the issue of information integration. This is a function of being able to capture the appropriate data, by interval, associated with activityıs volume and handling time. Technically there is no real challenge as todayıs open system architectures present easily accessible data. The real issue here is that the providers of e-mail servers and the like need to be educated about the data that the workforce management systems will require for forecasting purposes. Once the appropriate data is being captured there are a number of ways that the workforce management system can retrieve or actively query the databases. The question is do the providers of e-mail servers care about this? The strategic relationships between the vendors will facilitate this, but it will take time to develop and test. We expect more detailed announcements from Aspect, Blue Pumpkin, IEX and others in the pretty near future.

While integration represents no significant technical challenge the question is how much of priority is going to be placed on the issue by the email providers and the workforce management vendors themselves. Both of these vertical markets are having trouble staying abreast of demand for their basic functionality so there is a fundamental lack of motivation. The real solution to increasing the sense of urgency is a high profile client demanding the functionality as part of a make or break deal. Then you will get some action. This will happen, if not right away, soon.

Data acquisition is only the start, however, to the real issues presented by the new avenues into the customer contact center. WFMG believes that volume forecasting may be accomplished through a reasonable formula, similar to those used to forecasts calls, for e-mail and web-chat. The complicated part begins when you look at the service level metric (how long can the task wait before it is completed in an acceptable time) associated with the activity. Traditional call center service level metrics i.e. Average Speed of Answer and Service Level (80 % within 15 seconds) will have to be fine-tuned and new formulas applied to determine requirements.

Every business has different levels of acceptable service. The same can be said of different activities in the center. Phone calls are commonly addressed on demand, Voice over IP also is an on demand action, Fax is less demanding and emails may be handled differently altogether. If you treat an email exactly as a call, then you are in luck. Most workforce systems, as they exist, should be able to layer this activity on top of the calls. Logically though, emails are not handled the same as calls. Also it not likely that there will be a dedicated group of agents to take and exclusively process emails, faxes, etc. Multi-skilled scheduling is here to stay.

Letıs say that it would be acceptable to your customers to return e-mails in 24 hours for standard response. The workforce management system providers now have to layer the workload associated with emails on top of the call volume and any other activity or channel. The differing businesses and activities demand that the workforce providers develop a solution that will allow for users to flexibly define the service level achievement for that activity, with the associated media. Just as traditional calls used Erlang C for the algorithm for requirements, new mathematical formulas must be created for the new media.

WFMG suggests that workforce management systems address the integration of the multiple channels into the call center at the forecasting/requirements level. Managers should be presented with service level goals for the different activities and the resulting requirements should reflect the workload associated with all activities. The new skills based algorithms then simply needs to generate the appropriate schedules based upon the combined workload.

Another consideration is the nature of the activities themselves in terms of how they may be processed. Some activities may be exclusive. It is easy to imagine, though, that an agent can begin to respond to an e-mail request, take a call or respond to a voice over IP requests and then return to the e-mail. The data associated with the completion time of this activity is critical for measuring, on an on-going basis, the average handling time, associated with the event. If this data is not reported or is corrupted, then the entire workload model is skewed, thus negatively impacting the efficiency of the schedule.

The workforce management vendors are positioned, some better than others, to address the impact of e-commerce by using the new algorithms developed for the skills based scheduling dilemma. It is critical that they integrate with the various providers to receive and store the appropriate data for forecasting purposes and consider the impact of exclusive activities and the processing of those activities. New service level parameters will have to be developed and flexible approaches will have to be delivered for different applications. It is however fundamentally the same problem that initially presented itself to the workforce management system providers. How can we make the most of the resources we have given the skills, availability, preferences, seniority, productivity and service level requirements to enable call centers to successfully deliver service? There are simply more pieces to the puzzle.