By Paul Jarman, CEO, NICE CXone

The days of driving to the bank, signing the back of a paper check, inserting it into a glass tube and sending it through a tunnel to a customer service clerk are gone. Customers—and the agents who serve them—expect more, and while banking has a well-deserved reputation for approaching change methodically, that’s beginning to shift as companies across the industry increasingly embrace digital transformation.

To meet these evolving expectations, today’s banks are also evolving the workforce management processes they rely on to deliver flexibility and convenience to customers and the contact center agents who serve as the face of the organization. By modernizing four key contact center workforce management processes—planning, forecasting, scheduling and managing change—and ensuring that you’re set up to effectively manage a wide range of channels, you can position your organization to meet the demands of agents as well as customers in an in an increasingly digital world. Here’s what you need to keep in mind in the process.

Plan for the future more accurately

Many banks that rely on traditional, manual planning processes fail to maximize the full ROI of long-term planning in the contact center. Modern workforce management solutions and processes leverage intelligent automation to analyze historical data with dozens of algorithms to make the most precise decisions about future demand. Look for a solution that offers the ability to conduct two-way “what-If” analyses and reverse problem solve between staffing requirements and performance metrics. This will enable you to better understand the staffing requirements needed to meet KPIs while creating specific scenarios around demand, shrinkage and handle time, ultimately allowing you to improve customer service while realizing forecasts that are 6% to 10% more accurate than traditional long-term forecasting methods.

Forecast more efficiently and effectively

In the dynamic digital contact center, effective forecasting is more important than ever, but the volume of forecasting methods can overwhelm contact center managers. Modern AI-driven workforce solutions can automatically evaluate dozens of different algorithms and leverages historical data patterns, seasonality and cyclicality as well as digital channel attributes to enable your teams to forecast more accurately and efficiently.

Enable more flexible scheduling

Traditional scheduling tools are rigid, and they fail to give agents much flexibility in their schedules.

As banks continue to compete for available, qualified workers amid the Great Resignation, however, providing modernized workforce tools in the increasingly digital workforce environment is paramount. Engaging these agents with these modernized tools will help you meet KPIs and impact the customer’s overall experience.

As you evolve how you schedule agents, look for a workforce management solution that gives agents a way to make last-minute updates or changes when an unexpected event occurs, whether it be a sick child, a car breakdown or last-minute home repair. Unexpected moments are part of life, and self-servicing scheduling delivers agility for agents before the schedule is created, during the scheduling process and after the schedule is published:

• Before the schedule is created: Allow agents to set their availability while ensuring that business needs will be met. They can also set their work preferences, which are then applied to the schedule based on rules set by your contact center.
• During the schedule process: Consider using intelligent automation to offer options tailored to the agent, like self-scheduling and hybrid scheduling.
• After the schedule is published: Ensure that agents have visibility into pre-approved shifts swaps, as well as trading options, extra hours, and automatic adjustments of breaks and lunches, to give customer service agents more control over their work and home lives while ensuring that staffing meets the bank’s daily needs.

Manage intraday change

An important step in modernizing your workforce management capabilities is to implement intraday change management. This matters because it helps contact centers respond in real time to the changes in demand that happen during the day. Modernizing workforce management gives the contact center more agility and flexibility.

Once a schedule is published, your work isn’t done—you need to continue to gauge demand throughout the day to reforecast and adjust staffing levels as needed. Many contact centers avoid overstaffing by re-simulating and re-forecasting two to three times a day.

When life happens, modernized workforce management supports schedule and business need changes with skill-aware change management. Comprehensive real-time schedule and activity adherence helps teams monitor what is happening in both the remote and the brick-and-mortar contact center. Look for a solution that offers intraday analytics that provide net staffing calculations by queue and automatic intraday reforecasting to enable you to:

• Determine plan effectiveness.
• Analyze and react to changes.
• Reduce the time spent manually adjusting schedules.
• Ensure adherence to plan.
• Automatically account for the success rates of all self-service bots and IVR; reforecast and restimulate and optimize net staffing.

Consider the nature of digital channels

Interactions with bank customers are no longer restricted to the telephone; customers now use a variety of communication methods to make contact, including social media, chat and email, with each interaction adding up to an omnichannel digital customer experience. Digital channels, from email to social media to chat, have placed new demands on customer service agents, with work no longer flowing in one direction and managed by a single employee. Today’s customer service agent must be able to handle both immediate response channels, including phone and chat, as well as deferred response channels, like email. Ensure that the workforce management solution and processes you have in place consider the unique nature of digital channels to calculate shrinkage, modeling and multi-skill efficiencies. They should also be able to consider the cognitive load required of each channel and as well as the individual agent’s ability to handle multiple channels simultaneously.

The pneumatic tube that carried hand-signed checks—and the manual processes used to manage the agents who received those checks inside the bank—are almost extinct. The time to modernize key workforce management processes, empowering agents and creating a more agile digital contact center, is now.