The Future is Flexible

What do we mean by ‘flexibility’ when it comes to Contact Centre schedules?

The Oxford English Dictionary has three definitions and I’d like to go over each of these to highlight the differences in each definition when it comes to Contact centre Planning and how you can apply it to your thinking.?

The first definition is ‘The quality of bending easily without breaking’. Whilst, as a man in his fifties, I can assure you that I can only barely remember a time when this applied to my muscles and joints, I think this is an important quality that you should look to build into your plans.? This doesn’t just apply to your scheduling - this is an important quality to build into your entire planning process.? Your planning team needs to be able to bend and yield to the winds of change in terms of revised marketing plans, market changes, customer demographics or behavioural change, process or system updates or even, heaven forbid, a global pandemic.? All of this needs to be accommodated without the whole process breaking apart messily like Simon and Garfunkel (ask your parents, kids!).

The second definition is ‘The ability to be easily modified’.? This is often where flexibility becomes a naughty word for businesses everywhere.? Unfortunately, in the world of WFM, easy modification is not often possible.? Huge amounts of tricky, costly manual work is required to affect change.? Process after process is sometimes needed to make sure that records are maintained, schedules are amended and updates made to external systems.? Contact Centre teams across the world often ban short-notice change or build in ‘change-freeze’ periods simply so that they can avoid the need for such tricky manoeuvring. You don’t need me to tell you that they can drive spectacularly unwelcome behaviours in their workforce such as casual absence and attrition.?

And the final definition of flexibility is ‘Willingness to change or compromise’.? An absolutely key feature of your approach to building schedules and offering something to your workforce that they can benefit from is your own personal - and your business’s - willingness to allow changes to your skillfully-crafted plans to accommodate for that most important and inevitable of things; change.? Compromise is a key element in managing people and managing plans.? Everybody knows just how hard you worked getting the plan together - it’s just that the world at large doesn't really care.? Things happen. Every minute of every day, stuff occurs and continuing to stand firm against the tide, Canute-like, is counter-productive and only results in getting your feet wet.?

So now we have ‘flexibility’ defined, let’s have a look at some general advice on how to be flexible.? And there won’t be any references to yoga, Zumba or star-jumps.

Try to understand reasons behind volatility and get ahead of the curve with regard to predicting change.? Understand what you do know, what you could or should know and what few things you could have no idea of in advance and build them into your plans.? Make sure that handovers from Forecasting to Scheduling to Real Time are thorough and detailed and feature possible ranges rather than specific, do-or-die numbers.? Saying ‘somewhere between 250 and 300’ rather than ‘268.3’ gives everyone the understanding that what we are dealing with is flexible and variable and that our response to it needs to be equally so. Focusing on the forecasted 268.3 will lead to us highlighting that the forecast was wrong, whereas the range will more likely be right.

Technology exists - like QStory, of course! - to allow the immediate automatic processing of change. But if you are not lucky enough to have access to Intraday Automation software yet, you should be looking to make modification as easy as you possibly can, for both yourself and for the end user, the agent.? Be sure to remove unnecessary approval layers wherever you can, turning asking someone for permission into keeping someone informed.? Understand that your plan is not static, so creating ‘change-freeze’ periods as no actual impact on whether things will actually change, it just creates work and promotes problems. There may be limits introduced to reflect a period of focus, but you should never look to eliminate all change.

Be mindful that the needs of the business and the needs of the individual are equally important.? If you can compromise, not only will you protect your plan from the twin-terrors of absence and attrition to a greater degree, you’ll also stand a greater chance of getting people onside when future issues arise.? You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, after all.? And no matter what your situation, how big you are or how busy your centre is every day, compromise is ALWAYS possible, too - it is only the degree of compromise that changes from situation to situation.

I’m an old timer when it comes to Contact Centre Planning so I’m familiar The Forum’s brilliant and insightful Flexibility Toolkit - my advice is that if you haven’t seen it already, make sure that you do that soon.? I love the many different approaches in there and the multiple factors that you should consider when building schedules for your workforce.? Everything from Term-Time contracts to the much-maligned (but generally misused) Zero-Hours contracts are powerful tools to use to make your scheduling approach more workforce-centric. But let’s have a look at this from a different perspective for a moment.??

All of the definitions of flexibility not only need to be adopted by yourself and your business - they also need to be adopted by your workforce for this to be a truly universally-beneficial feature of your business.? Agents need to understand and appreciate the need for flexibility on their part to make the business truly successful.? Sometimes, the volatile nature of demand in our centres will result in the need for short-notice changes to plans, the postponement and rescheduling of activities and the wholesale movement of personnel from one customer facing channel to another.? The need to work beyond the end of their shift occasionally is inevitable

For me, though, TRUE flexibility comes from offering your workforce a schedule that fulfils the needs of the customer and them allowing them to make wholesale, approval- and process-free changes that give them what they need from their work/life balance whilst not adversely affecting the business’s ability to service their customer’s needs.? Agents need to be able to see that the company supports them, their wellbeing and their drive for a centered, sensible working week.? They need to be able to see that there is an answer to the age-old and rather self-centric question ‘What’s In It For Me?’

And that's why QStory has developed Agent Flex - an incredible innovation, radically changing agent scheduling to answer that very question. Agents can now move all or even a small part of a shift to another time or another day, with no approval needed - whilst QStory will ensure the new schedule has no detrimental impact on service levels.? Customer experience and performance against targets are protected by QStory’s powerful algorithms, whilst the Colleague experience is dramatically and positively transformed. A ‘win-win’ situation which provides real, genuine flexibility for your workforce and your business.

Finally the technology is available to manage the 'quid pro quo' nature of a truly flexible relationship.