In my 3 part series about WFM, I was writing about how you could improve your life using some simple WFM principles and practices.
In this post I want to talk a little bit about on how WFM can affect your daily life, without you even knowing.
Let’s break down first what WFM is. WFM is the process through which we ensure that we have the right agents at the right time, and equally important at the right cost. But the cost of the agents doesn’t affect your daily life, unless you are their manager, so I won’t talk about this.
So how could having the right agents at the right time affect your daily life? Let’s break down WFM even more, beyond the definition. Almost each company is having nowadays a Customer Care department. The relationship with the customer is very important, because if you lose your customers you lose a lot of money. And no company in the world likes that.
So we have a Customer Care department, which most of the time translates in a call center with lots of agents that are answering calls, emails and chats, doing a lot of stuff to ensure that you, the customer, are happy.
But the question arrives, is that call center efficient? Are the agents present in the call-center at a given time enough to take all the call/chat/e-mails? Could they handle the call that will arrive in the next couple of weeks?
If there are not enough agents to answer the calls at the time you are calling, do you think your call will be answered right away? Of course not. You will have to wait while a very nice robotic voice will tell you that all the agents are busy right now and kindly asks you to wait, while putting a very nice elevator music. And you will wait, because you have a problem, that needs to be solved. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called the Customer Care department.
And now is the moment when WFM comes into play. Because this is our job, to ensure that your calls are taken in the proper time. So you won’t have to wait too long listening to the nice elevator music.
If I break down my job to single call level, my job is to predict when you will make a call and ensure that there will be an agent ready to take that call. And of course that’s a very hard thing to do. This is why I don’t even dare to make my forecast to the very second. I think I would have a better chance to win the lottery :).
But, using the tools that I have at my disposal and the experience that I’ve gathered in time, I can still make a good forecast for the week and even the day. And I can make a forecast in such a way, that I will ensure that there are enough agents to take most of the calls that will arrive that week.
And for me that is a very motivating thing. To know that the work that I do each day, could help people, that I’ve never met, solve their problems, it’s a very uplifting. Everytime when I’m having problems on the project, I’m thinking first at the caller, if we will be able to answer the calls first. Because if we manage to do that, if we manage to answers the calls, everybody else will be happy as well.
And this is how WFM could affect your daily life.