Rethinking WFM: Balancing Business, Customers & Agents

Transcript

[00:00:06] Welcome listeners to Contact Center Perspectives. My guest today has spent 20 plus years inside contact centers and almost all of it inside workforce management. He’s done outbound dialing campaigns inside BPO optimization. Stood up a workforce management function at a telehealth startup and spent time on the vendor side reselling workforce management software.

[00:00:28] And right now he’s doing something really fascinating, helping a team build their own workforce management platform from scratch. All using ai. He’s been named an ICMI Top 25 thought leader, and he’s a featured contributor for one of the best communities in our space. When he walks into a struggling workforce management org, he has a gift for asking the questions no one else thought to ask.

[00:00:50] He’s the founder of two three Consulting out of Charleston, South Carolina. Dan Smitley, welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives. 

[00:00:58] Thank you for that. Amazingly thorough and warm welcome. Glad to be here. Fantastic. Now, you’ve been in the contact center for 20 plus years and almost all of it in workforce management.

[00:01:09] What’s the pattern you keep seeing over and over again? The thing that you, that really never changes, no matter the industry or the size of the organization. There, there’s a couple. I would often say, especially inside of workforce management, the, that pattern that I see is that it kind of simplifies WFM down to simply butts in seats, math.

[00:01:28] Simple. It’s our foundation. I get it. Workforce management grew up out of this, oh look, we created this ling calculator. Maybe we can predict when people are calling and figure out when we need people. Yeah, it’s the appropriate starting point. But some organizations too often don’t move past that.

[00:01:41] And so instead they see workforce management as simply how can WFM maximize business needs? Some people have matured into maybe how can it meet business needs and meet customer demand. So we wanna service people within 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 90 seconds, whatever the service level agreement is.

[00:01:55] They settle there. That’s where WFM unfortunately gets pigeonholed quite often, and I see workforce management as being a little bit more comprehensive and actually being able to include agent needs and agent demands as well. Not an exclusion of those other two, but in, in compliment to the other two in.

[00:02:09] So the pattern that I see a lot is workforce management gets stuck to some extent. Inside of that, we’re optimizing for the business. We’re optimizing for the customer. Too often workforce management isn’t brought into the conversation about how can we optimize for the employees as well.

[00:02:22]  And, to continue with that discussion and that thought. As you go down that path, in our earlier discussions you talked about the three-way framework. And I view this as really a key differentiator for you. And you talked about WFM as holding three things intention at the same time, but you were just saying customer needs, business needs, agent needs.

[00:02:42]  Walk us through that framework. Sure. So my point being that w FM can include, should. Include the employee experience as a variable in the math. What I mean by that is if I’ve created schedules as a workforce management manager, director, and those schedules meet service levels and they minimize availability and we’re optimizing our staff.

[00:03:02]  But maybe those schedules are, monday through Friday, nine to five, and my whole population are a bunch of college students, I have a completely different problem. Absolutely. I’ve maximized to two of the three variables. It could be that my my, office or my call center is full of single mothers.

[00:03:18]  And again, Monday through Friday, nine to five maybe works for some but doesn’t work for others because school drop off is different for different ages and there’s the variable that I’m trying to communicate to people is the employee needs. The employee experience is an important part of how I need to quantify as the w fm leader, how I quantify success.

[00:03:34]  Depending upon the environment, it’s appropriate for me to over index on employee experience. I think of like a startup, right? They’re gonna be like, our culture’s the best. We care about our people. We’re gonna let them do whatever they, and so high schedule flexibility is gonna be really important, but we’re going to eat and probably minimize business outcome.

[00:03:49]  We’re overstaffed. So what we’ve got money. Our runway, way is 12 months out. We’ve got tons of, venture capitalist money. BPO might be exact opposite. I am tight, my margins are thin. I don’t, I can’t give agent flexibility and so it’s depending upon the organization, but my point is it’s still a variable even in the organizations that wanna minimize it.

[00:04:08]  It’s still something that we have to acknowledge and say, we’re making an active decision to increase or decrease the importance of the employee experience every bit. Now what happens if those three get outta balance? What breaks first? What does that actually look like on the floor? It looks different in each organization.

[00:04:25]  So again, each organization’s values and focus are gonna be different. BPO versus startup. What it’s going to look like is that WFM is getting overridden and ignored. They’re putting up proposals that are out of alignment with what the business is trying to accomplish. So maybe I’ve come in as an WFM manager that cares all about agent experience.

[00:04:44]  And the organization says, how can you save me more money? That’s all I care about. How can I do more with less? How can I get rid of staff and this employee experience manager? It’s going to get ignored. The opposite might be true. They come in W FM’s just narrowed in on I gotta maximize business outcomes, and the organization cares about their employee experience.

[00:05:00]  There’s gonna be a misalignment, there’s gonna be friction and the fall down. What it looks like when it comes apart is that w fm becomes marginalized. WFM goes into the corner and is ignored in a large part because they just are proposing solutions that. Doesn’t meet the current environment’s needs.

[00:05:16]  Interesting. No, interesting topic. Yeah, so understanding when they may not always have the same priority.

[00:05:24]  What, how would you approach our listeners if there’s somebody that may be new to workforce management? What would you propose as a kickoff or a starting point for them? So the listener, being a new to WFM leader or new to leader, I would definitely leader an ops leader that’s interacting with w fm for the first time, correct?

[00:05:43]  Yes. Okay. The ops leader. So if you’re an ops leader interacting with w fm for the first time be kind. Be patient. If WFM is new, they’re probably gonna be struggling to find good data, to be able to forecast. To understand the environment well. But what you need to know, at least what I would encourage you to do is suggest the three points upfront. To say, I don’t know your background, I don’t know. Your past WFM often is about business outcomes and service levels. I wanna make sure that we’re including our employees to some extent, whether that’s a feedback survey, whether that is a listening tour, whether that’s a a focus group.

[00:06:18]  I wanna make sure that you’re capturing that. Is that something that you can do? If not, can I help facilitate that so that you have a connection to the people that you are scheduling, that you’re monitoring via. RTA ’cause I think too often WFM leaders can take the easy path. And. Go after just the two, because that’s easy.

[00:06:34]  We do that all the time. That human variable the human piece of the agents adds a lot of complexity that honestly, I think a lot of WFM leaders just wanna avoid because it gets really complicated and really hard at that point. It does and sometimes too political. Internally. Very point.

[00:06:48]  Very good point. Yes. So we’re gonna switch gears a little bit. I know one of the things that we talked about and a major reason why you’re on this show today, talking to our audience, is, we did have a few surveys that ran through with our listenership and they feel that. One of the outcomes of that survey is they feel that workforce management is treated almost like a back office function.

[00:07:09]  Sure. Why do you think that perception exists, and who’s most responsible for changing it? Who’s respons, who’s responsible for changing it? I think it, who’s responsible for causing it? Who’s responsible for changing it is the same exactly. For me. It depends.

[00:07:27]  Again, I hate saying it depends upon the organization Sure. But it feels like a shared responsibility. Why did WFM get put into the corner and maybe this back office function? To some extent, WFM positioned themselves that way since some organizations, again, the leader simply wanted to say.

[00:07:40]  Listen, I don’t want your politics. I don’t want your people problems. I don’t want the agent issues. I am the data person. I look at the forecast. I give you schedules. You figure out the rest. And so they’ve intentionally built these guardrails to protect themselves to some extent and Sure.

[00:07:52]  And simplify it. I think w it’s fair to say w FM leaders have sometimes done that. I think the opposite can be true from the op side, or the same can be true of the op side where the ops is saying, we’ve got the people I hear you trying to care about the schedules, we’ll do the adjusting. You tell us how many people we need and we’ll figure out the best way to manage schedules to meet the needs and demands of my employees. And it, I really what it is. If we come down to it. Territorialism it. It’s saying, this is my space. Whether it’s WFM saying MySpace, don’t touch, or OPS saying MySpace, don’t touch.

[00:08:21]  And I think the solution to that is a more collaborative approach. How can we work together? We both care about. The business, having the ebitda, the profitability it needs. So that we all get our paychecks. We all care about the employee experience, so they keep coming back so we can pay our own bills.

[00:08:35]  We all care about the employee experience so that people keep coming in and we don’t have to spend so much money on attrition and on hiring. So like we care about the same things from different angles, let’s do it together. So that whole issue around. Who’s responsible for putting them there and who’s responsible for getting them out?

[00:08:49]  I think it’s Ops and WFM are both at fault, and they’re both going to be needed to bring WFM to the table and allow them to be more collaborative. Interesting. Yeah. I see that a lot with a lot of the conversations I’ve had with. Customers, clients, and just in different associations on, they talk about some of the silos between WFM leaders and CX ops leaders and looking at those silos and the kind of, the negative impact for the overall organization.

[00:09:20]  Because they’re not lock and step and they’re not really walk. Hyperfocused on what is the right path forward for the organization from a WFM lens. And I think I’ll be able to update that. But, so yeah. As we slide into that kind of siloed relationship on how they have to burn build bridges, yeah, we.

[00:09:42]  Looking at that, it’s, I feel strongly that if they both had similar KPIs, similar metrics that they needed to hit that it would be, that it would be a better path forward for the organization. That, there would be that bridge between the silos. But I do see a lot of conversation around the silos of both parties.

[00:10:05]  A friend of mine, Natalie Perez has put out some content recently around the same concept of we all had shared, if the wfam and ops had shared metrics that could help solve some problems. And I think there’s a point to it. I don’t think it’s wrong in the sense of like it’s a avoid it.

[00:10:18]  But I think for me. You can maintain some significant issues and problems while still having shared metrics because I can share a metric with you and still not wanna work with you. I can share a metric with you and still work in a silo. I think for me, I would prefer to go after the behaviors and the skillsets that are needed for collaboration.

[00:10:36]  Active listening, assuming the best in people. So some of these soft skills, just. Emotional intelligence, how am I showing up to this meeting where they just put me on blast publicly? I’m gonna show up frustrated and angry. So I need to figure out how to regulate myself. So I come into this meeting and actually still collaborate, not trying to blast them back.

[00:10:53]  It’s those soft skills that I think are more valuable. Than the shared metrics. Not to say the shared metrics aren’t helpful. They can be, but for me, I’d rather go to the root issue, which is, do I even know how to listen? Do I even know how to collaborate? Do I need a, do I know how to not just come in with answers?

[00:11:08]  W fm. We’ve got data. We think we have all of the answers, but to come in with questions instead, is this meeting your needs? Am I still understanding your goals and priorities correctly? If I were to make these changes, is that a positive or negative? And help me under, those are the skills I think I’d prefer to look into and invest in, versus where can we have shared metrics that align our focus?

[00:11:28]  It’s helpful, but I think you can avoid the bigger issue at hand. No, that makes perfect sense. It’s all about creating those relationships, those stronger relationships. I think so. Yeah. Definitely. I’m going to switch gears a little bit and talk about a little bit of continuing, continuing that conversation of, WFM in practice, just to gain that understanding for our director and VP level listeners that.

[00:11:54]  Really wanna take away some framework and some ideation from you. So I guess the question would be, when you walk into an organization where workforce management is struggling, what’s the first thing you look at? And from that lens, what really tells you immediately where the real problem is?

[00:12:11]  What is that root cause analysis when you go in? To and understand where workforce management is struggling. Yeah. So my last res, my last answer was like, genuine listening, building relationships. I gotta be consistent. So I’ve brought in because the organization, the w fm team is struggling.

[00:12:27]  W FM doesn’t get to define that. Ops is defining that, right? Unless WFM is saying, I’m failing at my job, I need a WFM expert to come in, they don’t. It’s really OPS saying, I’m not happy with how this is working. Please come in and fix it. So I need to start with ops. Why, what do you think is supposed to be happening?

[00:12:41]  What is happening? What are your expectations? Have you communicated those expectations? What happens when you communicate out those expectations? And just try to get a lay of the land of better defining what failure means. And to be honest. Why do you think you even need me? Clearly lay out why you think you need someone coming in to even look at the environment.

[00:12:57]  And then I go into w fm. Help me understand your perspective. I’ve heard that they want this. They don’t have, maybe this is their reason why they think you’re saying no. Can you help me understand why you’re saying no? What are the system limitations you’re coming up against? What are the political pushbacks that you’re getting?

[00:13:11]  Help me understand your perspective of Their expectations are unreasonable. They’ve always been un, they changed on a dime. Get the full context. And then I can overlay my own understanding of just what are best practices. And so it’s really about trying to customize the approach to that particular team, this ops leader or this ops leader’s unrealistic, Hey ops vp, you might need a better director.

[00:13:32]  This WFM manager is unrealistic. They are up to the times they’re trying to do it the old way. They wanna do the. It’s about adjusting it to the current environment, which is first understanding what is that environment, what are the expectations, what is, whether it’s a copy paste of other systems, whether it’s a culture change, a leadership change.

[00:13:49]  It always looks a little bit different, but I wanna make sure that whatever the solution is, it meets the current environment. Again, it’s about listening. It’s about coming in with curiosity. If I think that’s what other people should be doing, that’s definitely what I’m gonna be doing coming into an org.

[00:14:01]  And to jump into current environment, looking at what’s today and technology, how does AI align with workforce management? I know in our prior conversation you talked about building a proprietary system, workforce management system, utilizing ai. How are you or how you see AI workforce management not only today, but tomorrow, like what does that path forward look like?

[00:14:28]  I’m gonna give it maybe five years out maybe closer to 10. But I think the legacy WFM players are not adjusting fast enough. And what I mean by that is the genesis, the nicest aspect. To some extent, variant Calabrio has this weird new private equity partnership thing. We, who knows what they’re gonna do, but those legacy players are gonna get passed.

[00:14:47]  By people that are doing what my org is currently doing, which is we’re gonna use our own ai, just a cloud code, right? Codex, whatever the latest coding machine is. And building their own stuff. It starts with small automations. Look at this status when this happens.

[00:14:58]  Trigger this, go to Slack, message this, it starts with small automations. But those automations are the building blocks to be able to start building out larger and more complex things. I genuinely think that the WFM software market is gonna be eaten up by homegrown solutions of people building their own stuff inside of ai.

[00:15:15]  So that’s why I see the future right now. Ai. People are calling their proprietary algorithms they’ve had for the past 20 years, ai. And it’s really frustrating. Like I see so many WFM players saying, Hey, we’ve got AI under the hood. No, that’s your special version of er lang that you are now calling ai.

[00:15:32]  It’s still if then stuff, it’s not truly machine learning. It’s not really, it’s not age agentic really. And I think right now WFM isn’t being changed dramatically by ai, but I’m starting to see some of the early signs that it, that I think we’re gonna have new players coming into this space that are AI native, AI homegrown, they’re for the market, but they’re AI built or just homegrown AI solutions where people are doing it themselves and just vibe coding themselves into new automations.

[00:15:59]  I think it’s gonna be fun to watch ’cause I think it’s gonna be a lot more individual ownership. Versus trying to push through legacy players. I want this in the system. They don’t have to wait for Nice to update their roadmap with the, I’m a 500 person call center. Sure. I’m gonna take 20 years to get NICE’s attention.

[00:16:16]  Now I can just do it myself. Yeah. And to that point, it reminds me of back in our day when we went from, Excel spreadsheets and manual process to, okay, what can we automate today? What is that digital transformation? And we go through that whole process and now it’s, to your point it is if then statements looking at AI and.

[00:16:35]  We’re getting close to some machine learning, deep learning as we move forward. It’s definitely a very unique time to be in this space. And to your point with the size of different companies, small midsize and the pricing of some of these c systems out there that.

[00:16:52]  The build it ourselves, be proprietary type software. I could definitely see that path forward, it definitely makes sense, Dan. Absolutely. And do you see anything else that around the future of ai, that’s not all about hype, but maybe from a, an ai, maybe from a data lens, right?

[00:17:10]  Looking at data when it comes to forecasting, do you see any of those tools and integrations being utilized? No. Absolutely. In one of my previous roles I was a w FM director for a travel agency. in essence. Mostly cruising. And most of the agents were in Florida.

[00:17:27]  Which is great because then they get to get on the ships, they get experience the product themselves. That’s a great way to sell. It’s great until hurricane season when all of a sudden now the majority of your ships are being impacted. If every other couple weeks, if not every other couple months by another hurricane coming in, maybe your population of your agents are gonna be impacted.

[00:17:42]  That information, those models are available online. Why shouldn’t that be impacted and included inside of my WFM platform? Why? Why shouldn’t that automatically just feed in to say, your agent, this percentage of your agent population is currently inside of the realm of being impacted by this hurricane.

[00:17:57]  If they go down, you need to update the schedules for all of these other peoples to help offset, you need to reach out to these people who are off during when the hurricane is supposed to hit to see if they’ll pick up shifts because these people might be down and. I know the itineraries of all of the ships.

[00:18:10]  I know when they’re coming and going, what islands are supposed to be at based upon the trajectory, these ones are likely going to be impacted. You should do a proactive reach out to these people. Like all of that is known data that’s available online. Why isn’t that getting fed into my CRM? Why isn’t that getting fed into my wfm?

[00:18:26]  I think that’s one way that I think AI can bring in a lot of other data to inform and. Make it easier and more comprehensive. That’s one piece on just how do we do the business side of WFM? We’ll go back to the agent experience. It’s hard to include the human element, right? It’s easier when I can predict out the calls, the handle time, the service levels.

[00:18:46]  That’s all pretty straight math. When I try to understand how that’s going to impact people’s engagement, how is it gonna lead to attrition? If am I increasing or decreasing someone’s wellbeing based upon the work life balance I’m able to provide them and. Their work life balance is a different definition.

[00:19:01]  This other person’s work life balance. Those are incredibly hard conversations to have and then to try to inform the decision making of a w FM manager can be challenging. That can all be systematized. Like how hard would it be? For the agents to simply say, I do or do not like this schedule right now, I feel satisfied in my current schedule.

[00:19:18]  Coming in at this hour is great for me. I feel rejuvenated. I feel energized. I love the mornings I’m turning into a morning person. Give me more morning schedules. I have a kid, I don’t wanna tell you that I have a kid, but I need off at 3:00 PM every day. I just want you to know I have a heart. This is a lot of data that.

[00:19:32]  Can be communicated human to human. But could easily be stored inside of preferences currently. But I think a more comprehensive way of understanding my current work life experience is positively or negatively impacted. I think it could be really interesting to watching people’s performance intraday.

[00:19:47]  I’m a morning person. My, my conversion rate taps out and then drops as I start getting disengaged because I’m getting, these are the additional complexities that I think AI will be able to surface and pull in, so that way I’m not trying to consider it by looking at a bunch of different spreadsheets and saying, I’m gonna give Bobby his morning shift because I know he is burning out.

[00:20:03]  I can just have that in the system and it will automatically generate the schedules based upon those needs. Perfect. Absolutely. So last one, Dan, if you could get every ops leader listening right now to understand one thing about their WFM team that they probably don’t know about, what would it be?

[00:20:21]  They don’t know about their WFM team. They’re more human than they realize. WFM paints themselves as these nerdy don’t care about humans often. Give me the data and I’ll state. They have a human side and oftentimes they’ve had to suppress it to be successful in their role. They’ve had to lean into business outcomes.

[00:20:39]  They’ve had to lean into the numbers because that’s all people have asked of them for a long time. What I want you to know as that ops leader is there is. A human perspective there, they can care about the humanity of your agents. And I think there’s a good population that hasn’t had the opportunity to, that wants to step up and step into a consideration of agent employee experience.

[00:20:59] So go talk to them, go challenge them. What would it look like to try to include agent perspectives when creating the schedules so that way we can maybe try to reduce burnout, reduce attrition, and try to drive efficiency in another way, not just how many calls can we answer within in a single hour?

[00:21:14] So go talk to them. I think that’s single point. Go talk to your WFM leaders. Perfect. Love it. Dan, so this has been really good conversation. I know our listeners would love to learn more about you and find out maybe the right reason to have them reach out to you. I know we will definitely share your LinkedIn profile, your website but how else can people reach out or some of the reasons why they should reach out to you?

[00:21:38] Re reach out if you just have a w fm concern or issue. First and foremost, I am a horrible salesperson. I just wanna add value. So if you have a question or issue, I wanna hear about it. I want to talk like genuinely. Let’s just chat. Think of me as a way of a free w fm expert on this side that you can ask a question to if you think you might have.

[00:21:54] WFM that thinks that you think they can get leveled up? We’re going from nothing to something. I think we can level up. We have Excel, but we need to get into WFM software. We have WFM software, but it’s not running well. We’ve got software that’s running well, but maybe. Leadership inside of my WFM team seems off.

[00:22:06] You wanna level up, that’s where I can help and I can help in a variety of different ways. I’m not gonna be your RFP guy where it’s gonna be like, which platform should we get? But if you’re thinking about you want more and you just can’t articulate what that is and how to get there. My, my curiosity can help figure out what those questions are, get you to stake what you really want and can help you path, create a path towards that next level.

[00:22:26] If nothing else, connect to me on LinkedIn. I throw out a bunch of stupid call center memes and humor, and maybe you’ll find it funny every once in a while.