Workforce engagement management (WEM) is software that plans and checks the work of a contact centre's agents. It forecasts how many agents will be needed each half hour, schedules their shifts and checks that they keep to them. It also scores the quality of their calls and analyses what customers are calling about.
Why does a contact centre need a forecast? Calls do not arrive evenly. A food delivery app gets far more calls at dinner time than at 4 p.m. With too few agents, customers wait for ten minutes and many hang up. With too many, the company pays agents to sit idle. Agents are the largest cost of a contact centre, so getting the number right matters.
Here is how the forecast works. The software studies the call records that contact centre software has collected for past weeks. It learns the pattern for each day and each half hour, and it adjusts for known events, such as a festival sale or a cricket final. This kind of prediction is called demand forecasting.
Take, for example, the customer care of a food delivery app between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on a Sunday. The software forecasts 1,200 calls in that hour. Each call takes 5 minutes on average, including the notes afterwards. That is 6,000 minutes of work, or 100 hours, so at least 100 agents must be on the phones. To answer most calls within 20 seconds, the software adds 10 more, so it plans for 110. But at any moment, about 3 out of every 10 agents on shift are on a break, in training or on leave. So it schedules about 157 agents for that hour. During the evening, it compares the plan with the real calls. If calls rise faster than expected, it alerts the supervisor to cancel a training session and bring those agents back.
The second half of WEM is quality. Supervisors score agents' calls against a checklist, which the industry calls quality management. Earlier, a supervisor could score only two or three calls per agent a month. Today, conversation intelligence can score every call, and WEM shows those scores in each agent's record. It also groups calls by reason, for example "late order" or "refund not received". This is called interaction analytics.
How is WEM different from general workforce management (WFM)? WFM plans shifts for shops, hospital wards or warehouses. WEM is built for the contact centre. It plans shifts by the half hour, from call and chat volumes, and adds the quality checks. It also plans for the calls that a voice bot will answer, so that fewer agents are needed.