A while back I was reminiscing with an old friend about days long-past and all the projects we did back at MCI in the 90’s. One of these was a nationally broadcast shopping channel. At the time, the company was a relatively new national broadcasting phenomenon but nonetheless, they had two centers straddling their broadcasting studios. If I remember correctly, each of these had about 1200 agents. In addition, they had the ability to bring another 2000 or so remote agents online and continually monitored inbound traffic patterns using data directly from MCI’s network to determine in near real-time, when this was needed. Please don’t quote me on all the numbers, this was a very long time ago.
In any case, back then the shopping channel had workforce management down to a science. They had direct, real-time feedback to and from the studio and could not only accurately predict inbound traffic and respond to it to ensure service levels were maintained, they could (and did) use real-time performance in the centers to actually guide the broadcast in real-time. In other words, on-air hosts and their production teams knew what was happening in the center and could adjust their presentations accordingly – in real-time!
What was amazing is that, at the time, they were doing all this with Excel spreadsheets and a relatively simple database*. Better still, their workforce management team consisted of about 5 or 6 [truly exceptional] people. The coordination between their WFM team, routing desk, contact center management, and production teams was so well-defined and finely tuned that the underlying technology (for WFM) didn’t need to be an expensive masterpiece of engineering. In their case, some spreadsheets, a simple database* and a team guided by good data and an exceptional process were all that was needed.
Technology provides tools but it’s just a box in the data center (or cloud) without effective business process enablement.
Notes:
* Not meant to take away from either the spreadsheets or database, they were works of art!