Mastering contact center workforce management in your contact center isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about creating a positive ripple effect. When your team feels supported and set up for success, they’re more likely to experience job satisfaction and stick around longer. But it’s not just your employees who benefit. Having your agents positioned exactly where and when your customers need them leads to faster resolutions, happier interactions, and ultimately, more satisfied customers.
That said, managing a workforce in an omnichannel contact center is no small task. With customer interactions happening across multiple channels at the same time, accurately predicting demand while making the most of your team’s unique skills can be a real balancing act. Effective contact center workforce management is the key to keeping both your agents and your customers happy. But with so many moving parts—agent skills, break schedules, channel-specific demands, and peak times—it can quickly become a complex puzzle.
In this guide, we’ll break down what contact center workforce management truly means, why it’s a critical part of your operations, and share practical tips to help you level up your strategy.
What Is Call Center Workforce Management?
Contact center workforce management (WFM) is the practice of optimizing your resources—your team, tools, and processes—to achieve your business goals. By aligning your agents, QA specialists, and other team members with key resources like budgets and technology, WFM helps drive results, enhance customer and employee satisfaction, and maximize ROI.
When done well, workforce management enables contact centers to anticipate peak times, meet customer demands, and keep agents engaged.
At its core, WFM is about ensuring your contact center is staffed effectively to meet customer expectations. For example, if a customer calls in needing help with a new software feature, the goal is to have an agent with the right expertise ready to assist them. Simply put, WFM is all about having the right people, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time.
However, managing a workforce isn’t always straightforward. It can become complex when your contact center handles high volumes of interactions, multiple product categories, or operates across various channels. Balancing customer satisfaction, agent engagement, and work flexibility requires thoughtful planning.
The Role of WFM Solutions
This is where WFM tools come into play. A robust WFM solution helps you:
- Forecast customer demand accurately
- Balance agent workloads effectively
- Optimize staffing for fast, reliable customer support
With a WFM solution, your contact center benefits from:
- Happier Customers: Faster resolutions and better experiences
- Engaged Agents: Improved work-life balance and reduced burnout
- Stronger Business Outcomes: Higher ROI, lower customer churn, and better resource utilization
Effective workforce management is essential for contact centers looking to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, and employee well-being. Ready to create a winning WFM strategy? Start with these key steps.
Forecasting
Forecasting is the backbone of effective contact center workforce management. It’s about calculating the expected volume of customer calls or tickets in the days, weeks, or months ahead. To get accurate predictions, you need a data-driven approach that leverages historical numbers, trends, and patterns.
That said, the process isn’t always easy. It requires recording and archiving every customer interaction across all channels—voice, email, chat, web, and SMS. This data forms the foundation of your forecasting strategy.
But historical data alone isn’t always enough. External factors like seasonal events, product launches, or even unexpected disruptions like weather or equipment failures can throw off your projections. To stay ahead, you need to account for these variables when predicting demand.
Employee Scheduling
Once you’ve forecasted your call center’s demand, the next step is planning your staff coverage. This means scheduling shifts based on when demand will be highest or lowest. In an omnichannel contact center, it’s crucial to allocate more agents to channels that anticipate higher activity levels, such as chat during peak sales events or phone support after a product release.
When done effectively, scheduling leads to:
- Improved first-call resolution
- Maximized cost efficiency
- Boosted customer satisfaction and service level scores
However, relying on manual processes like spreadsheets to align agents with call volume can be time-consuming and error-prone. Investing in specialized tools can help streamline this step.
Assigning Agents
After forecasting and scheduling, the focus shifts to assigning agents in a way that maximizes productivity while preventing burnout.
It’s not just about filling time slots—it’s about assigning the right agents to the right tasks. Consider their skills, experience, and expertise. For instance, agents with deep product knowledge should be tasked with handling queries related to that product. Similarly, agents with strong communication skills might excel in customer escalations.
To keep things fair and balanced, you can also implement shift bidding, allowing agents to choose shifts that work best for them while reducing the load on overworked team members.
Intraday Management
Even with the best forecasts and schedules, real-time management is essential to maintain flexibility.
Intraday management ensures your workforce is optimally assigned as the day progresses. If unexpected shifts in demand occur—like a spike in calls due to a service outage—you may need to adjust your staffing levels on the fly.
Key actions to focus on include:
- Tracking Adherence: Are agents sticking to their schedules? Are they where they’re supposed to be?
- Measuring Productivity: How efficiently are agents handling customer interactions? Are they meeting performance goals?
By actively monitoring and adjusting your operations throughout the day, you can stay ahead of fluctuations and ensure your contact center consistently meets its service level targets.
Benefits of Call Center Workforce Management
There are many perks of effective workforce management in your call center. With workforce management, you will:
Exceed Your Customers’ Expectations
Without proper workforce management, meeting your customers’ expectations is almost impossible. Here’s the thing: customers in this day and age care more about great customer service experiences than ever. Time is a crucial factor here; a customer just won’t overlook a long waiting time.
Allocating your resources more effectively with workforce management will help you maximize service levels and keep your customers happy with quick resolutions from agents that can understand their problems.
Optimize Agent Scheduling
Contact centers that have implemented hybrid or fully remote work environments may have a harder time adjusting their agent schedules appropriately.
In a call center where all the agents are physically present on the floor, the manager can just take a quick look and modify agent schedules accordingly to prevent overstaffing or understaffing.
Workforce management, accompanied by the right software tools, helps call center managers adjust agent schedules to match their target service levels and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) regardless of where their agents work.
Make Your Employees Happier
Workforce management can have a positive impact on your agents’ well-being and job satisfaction.
Understaffing due to improper workforce allocation causes your agents to burn out quickly, which can negatively affect their productivity, and even worse, drive them to quit their jobs faster.
With workforce management, you’ll be able to predict demand more accurately and determine how many agents your contact center needs to match the call volume. Not to mention, your agents won’t be asked to work beyond their capacities, helping you retain them for a longer time.
The cost of hiring, onboarding, and training an agent can significantly hurt your call center’s finances if you have a low turnover rate. Not to mention, your call center will develop a bad reputation and drive high-quality agents away from applying for open positions.
Maximize Your ROI
Workforce management can increase your contact center’s revenue by making your agents available at the right time. Optimal resource allocation can also reduce waiting times and customer churn rates so that you never miss a support or sales call.
On top of that, workforce management helps you decide the number of agents you need. Human resources consume about two-thirds of a contact center’s budget, and without workforce management, overstaffing (and overspending) becomes more likely.
Of course, you need to make sure your agents are properly trained and equipped before assuming that it’s a numbers problem.
10 Actionable Tips for Effective Call Center Workforce Management
Workforce management can do more harm than good when implemented incorrectly. To maximize the return on investment of your workforce management efforts, follow these 5 steps:
1. Build a Workforce Management Team
If you’re serious about improving your workforce management, assigning a dedicated team will drive the best results. You can either hire a whole new team or assign some of your existing employees to the job.
Then, you need to invest in training your WFM team and making sure that your goals are clear. It’s also important that you equip them with the right software tools that will help them do their job more accurately and efficiently.
A workforce management solution would be ideal here as it’ll provide your team with access to powerful data visualization tools, demand estimates, historical analytics, and employee performance data.
2. Maintain Compliance With Labor Laws
Your workforce management program must be designed in compliance with labor laws. These laws protect employee rights and interests. The most prominent labor laws include the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
3. Track Relevant Metrics and KPIs
One of the best ways to optimize your workforce management effort is to track and measure your KPIs. Keeping track of the numbers that matter will help you identify opportunities for improvement and make informed decisions that can further enhance your workforce management strategy.
For example, if your agents struggle in a particular area, focusing your training efforts on it will improve your agent performance and help meet your workforce management targets.
4. Encourage Self-Service for Your Agents
Building a self-service knowledge base for your agents can help them do better at their jobs without having to ask for help. Ideally, your knowledge base should include helpful how-to guides, answers to the most frequently asked questions, real-life scenarios and the ideal ways to handle them, and tutorials on using different software tools.
5. Foster a Culture of Continuous Learning
Call center agents love to feel involved and appreciated. By allowing them to take on more responsibilities and expand their skills, you’ll motivate them to perform better at their jobs.
For example, if you train your inbound call agent on how to respond to customer queries on other channels like email or chat, they’ll feel more confident in their capabilities. Not only will you reduce your agent turnover rate but also make your customers more satisfied.
6. Deploy Multi-Skill and Flexible Scheduling
Agent scheduling isn’t meant to be random — with almost all modern contact centers adopting an omnichannel environment, it’s become vital to schedule agents from a skill-based point of view.
For example, agents who are proficient at handling phone calls should be prioritized for phone support assignments. You should also consider the expected demand for each channel based on accurate data-based forecasts — channels that expect the highest levels of demand should have more agents readily available to support customers.
Adopting skill-based agent scheduling also means that you’ll need to fine-tune your coaching and training strategies. For instance, you might need to train more agents on how to provide email support to fill in the gaps when the demand for email support increases.
It’s also important to provide some sort of flexibility for your agents by giving them more control over the time and length of their shifts, as well as which channels they prefer to work on and from where they like to work (office or remotely). Flexible scheduling can significantly boost agent satisfaction and minimize turnover rates, as well as streamline workforce management and reduce staffing costs.
7. Elevate Agent Adherence to Enhance Customer Service
Agent adherence stands as a crucial component in your Workforce Management (WFM) cycle. It’s more than just a measure of efficiency and productivity; it’s the cornerstone of intelligent intraday management, accurate long-term forecasting, and effective scheduling and performance management.
Providing exceptional customer service isn’t all about having skilled agents — yes, it’s important, but it’s equally important to ensure that these great agents are available to your customers when they need them.
To bolster adherence in your contact center, consider these strategies:
- Embrace Tailored Adherence Goals: Recognizing the diverse nature of a multi-skill, multi-channel contact center, where interaction durations vary, adopting a uniform adherence goal is never a solution. Instead, you should aim for dynamic, individualized goals that reflect the unique aspects of each role and channel.
- Spread the Responsibility for Adherence: While measuring your agents’ adherence is vital, it shouldn’t be their responsibility alone. Managers must also collaborate closely with the WFM team to ensure the accuracy of schedules, fostering shared accountability for maintaining adherence across all levels.
- Prioritize Daily Adherence Measurement: Waiting a week or a month to measure adherence in a fast-paced contact center environment just doesn’t cut it. Instead, you should opt for daily tracking allows for more accurate benchmarking, enabling finer-tuned intraday management that aligns more closely with actual demands.
Focusing on these areas will help you enhance the effectiveness of your agents and, consequently, the quality of your customer service.
8. Revolutionize Work Schedules With Shift Bidding and Agent Empowerment
Shift bidding, when done right, can be a game-changer for optimizing your contact center operations. It factors in an agent’s performance, call-handling skills, experience, and other metrics to balance staffing efficiently while reducing burnout among agents.
To make less appealing shifts more attractive to your agents, you need to use incentives — This approach not only fills these shifts but also acknowledges the agents’ willingness to work during these periods, resulting in higher agent satisfaction rates and better customer service.
Empowering agents with more control over their schedules marks a significant shift in workplace dynamics. It enables them to adjust their work schedules, improving their work-life balance and helping them maintain much-needed workplace flexibility. With advanced rule-setting and pre-approval features in WFM solutions, you can further streamline the process, allowing for easy integration of agent-requested changes or preferences.
9. Encourage Cross-Functional Collaboration
Enabling cross-functional collaboration is a great way to address agents’ concerns and foster a culture of shared accountability.
To encourage collaboration, within your call center, try implementing the following strategies:
- Schedule regular cross-departmental meetings
- Promote open discussions on workforce management (WFM) challenges
- Break down silos by initiating inter-departmental projects
Additionally, you can use collaboration tools that enable seamless communication across various channels. They help your employees share files, access updates and documents, and work efficiently by closing communication gaps.
10. Prepare for Unexpected Surges in Demand
Sometimes, it can be difficult to anticipate certain demand spikes. A good practice is to create a buffer team for those instances—a group of agents who are willing to fill in the gaps and work additional or different when required. Of course, you should continuously change team members every month. Being a part of this team should also be voluntary.
Moreover, you can use real-time adjustments to maintain flexibility and service level during unexpected demand surges.
Why Use a Workforce Management Call Center Solution
Now that you’re more familiar with the importance of workforce management, you can’t underestimate the value that a workforce management call center solution brings to the table. Here’s what you can expect from a WFM system:
Improved Forecasting and Scheduling Accuracy With Automation
Some call centers rely on manual data entry and calculations using spreadsheets or other generic tools, which can take a huge amount of time and effort. This approach may also affect the accuracy of your forecasts. Plus, using spreadsheets means you’ll find yourself relying on guesswork more heavily, especially when it comes to the timeframes of your meetings and training sessions.
Workforce management software improves agent scheduling and forecasting accuracy, enabling you to get accurate numbers that will help you prevent overstaffing or understaffing. They’re equipped with powerful automation features that help you save time and effort by eliminating redundant manual tasks.
They also make it easier for you to improve the accuracy of your forecasts. WFM automation features throughout the workforce management cycle often include:
- Time tracking
- Scheduling management
- Resource allocation
- Performance tracking
- Attendance tracking
WFM tools can even predict call volumes and the number of agents required to handle them. And while you shouldn’t fully rely on these forecasts, they serve as a good starting point for you to build on and make accurate predictions.
Enhanced Communication
Workforce management tools help keep everyone in your contact center in the loop, including stakeholders and other third parties.
WFM solutions integrate agent portals that facilitate communication between contact center agents and their managers with alerts and notifications about benchmarks, shifts, and policy adjustments.
Moreover, effective communication results in a more productive workforce that’s focused to achieve your organizational goals and objectives.
Reporting and Analytics
WFM software tools generate comprehensive reports and analytics that provide access to key insights about your contact center, including high call volume times, employee absenteeism, performance metrics and KPIs, and customer churn rates.
This will help you forecast customer demand more accurately by analyzing patterns from your historical data reports.
How to Choose the Right Workforce Management Solution for Your Contact Center
There are many contact center-focused WFM solutions, but not all of them are going to be suitable for your contact center.
First, you need to define your requirements and identify the features that can fulfill these requirements. You should also assess how such a solution would fit into your current system. Some solutions may integrate seamlessly into your strategy they enable you to allocate your human resources more flexibly to accommodate demand on different support channels.
Further, integrating a new solution into your system can facilitate access to data and eliminate manual work, contributing to more accurate performance reports and forecasts. You should consider the solution’s built-in reporting capabilities — advanced WFM software can provide detailed reports and insights into your workforce utilization and agent productivity metrics.
Once you’ve developed a clearer idea of what you need in a WFM solution, you need to set your budget allocations. Different WFM software solutions offer different pricing packages, but you also need to consider things like updates and any other additional costs.
However, make sure that you don’t get carried away with the software’s cost. Remember, the whole point of optimizing your workforce management is to maximize efficiency and reduce costs, so if a WFM solution will significantly free up your resources and make your employees make the most out of their work days, the monthly subscription costs become less relevant.
How Balto Can Optimize Contact Center Workforce Management
Empower Your Agents and Transform Workforce ManagementSuccessful workforce management begins with empowering your agents to perform at their best. When your team has the tools and confidence they need to excel, your contact center thrives.
With Balto, you can equip your agents with real-time guidance powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whether they’re handling inbound calls or troubleshooting customer queries, Balto ensures they respond accurately and effectively every time.
Balto also supports your workforce management strategy with:
- Accurate Forecasting: Gain insights into customer behaviors and call patterns to predict demand.
- Real-Time QA: Minimize human error and address issues that impact low scores on the spot.
- Skills-Based Routing: Match customers with the right agents to maximize satisfaction.
Ready to optimize your workforce and elevate your contact center’s performance? Get a free live demo of Balto and see how real-time AI can transform the way you manage your team.