Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss contact center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're joining us to learn and grow together in order to provide world-class customer service to each and every one of our clients. My name is Dave Hoekstra product evangelist for Col Calabrio.
And I have several guests joining us today because we are talking about workforce management. And of course when you talk about workforce management, the last thing you want to do is have one person, you want to have three. So I've got three of my my close associates here that are part of the Col Calabrio team, and I'm very, very happy that they are here. One of the questions we get asked quite frequently usually has to do with around staffing a workforce management team.
Things like, who should I hire? What kind of competencies should I look for? What's the ratio of people to agents, right? Those things are, they're tough to answer, especially when you're first getting started. So we decided we wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about those today. Now I'm gonna get to all three of my guests, but I want to introduce the first one. He comes to us from many, many years in workforce management. Florian Garnet.
He's our product marketing manager for W F M here at Calabrio. But he's also had extensive time in the space here. So, Florian, first of all, how are you doing today? And second of all, tell us, tell us why we should care about what you
say. Doing great, Dave. Thanks for having me on the podcast today. Yeah. I don't know that you should care about what I have to say, but I do have some experience in workforce management, so hopefully that helps. I've been in the contact center industry since about 2011. I started out as an agent. Taking calls for a company that needed somebody to speak French, and I could do that.
So did that for a bit and quickly fell in love because I had some love with Excel already with workforce management. And over the last few years, really from 2012 through 2020, I ran workforce management teams of various sizes. The larger one for one of the ride sharing companies here in the US where we had about 6,000 agents. And we were forecasting, scheduling those agents throughout the globe really with you know, BPOs in the Philippines and in South America mainly. So, yeah.
I've been in love and I'm a proud W F M nerd.
That's great. And so, you know, I know with your experience. Your, the company was growing pretty fast, to say the least which means you had to expand your agent population pretty quickly, which also mean conversely, you had to grow your workforce management team. You know, like I said earlier, one of the questions we get a lot is kind of what kind of ratio.
Do we see, and I know there's no real definitive objective answer, but when we talk about W F M staff versus agents, what's a, what's a good place to start?
Yeah. You would really please, our friends at the s WPP who said that there's no such thing as industry standards. They love to say that and they're not wrong. But when it comes to staffing up a WFM team, there are boundaries that you'd like to respect a bit. When it comes to schedulers, that's where you see the most commonly ratios. Being applied roughly, I would say one scheduler for every a hundred agents seems to be a, a good mark.
You see that when you need to schedule for 200, 300 folks, it becomes really cumbersome. When it comes to forecasting, it's a little different. It's not so much about the number of agents you're managing, but the number of skills that you have to forecast for it. Time consuming to forecast for a single skill. If you have 20 skills, you, you need to devote quite a few of of your hours in a given day or week to, to those skills.
So you know, looking at ratios more towards the number of skills that you have to, to forecast for there. And then then you have the third. Piece of the triad of workforce management, which is realtime management. And there, what I like to think about is the hours of operations that you're supporting. So for rta the number of eyeballs you're gonna need on the screen and how long you're gonna need those eyeballs to stick around for, you know, throughout the week.
So running a 24 7 hour operation might be very different than a five days a week, eight to five kind of kind of operation
now. If doing the math, so you had 60 schedulers working for the team there.
I did not we were running Slim is what I would I would call it. But what we did is rely on some of the BPOs and the W F M staff that they had at each site to step up on the RTA piece, but also on the scheduler. So we were relying on other teams that we managed with a trim down version you know, at our headquarters in Nashville.
Okay, so that was a bit of a gotcha question and I admittedly tried to, tried to stump you on that one because the, clearly there are economies of scale at play here, right? Once you get to a certain number, you don't need the exact one to 100 ratio that, that kind of comes through it, you know, you start to see the, the ability to do that and. That's, that's an important thing and that's why it's so hard to answer this question is, you know, yes.
When you're first starting out, you know, you get above a hundred agents and one single person is scheduling all of those people. That's, that's a lot. Especially you have to do schedule exceptions and re realtime analysts and all of those things, but we, we definitely see some economies of scale there, so. Great. Thank you for that. It's wonderful to have you on. Appreciate it. The next voice you're about to hear, Is my buddy Kevin Wilk.
Kevin has been doing this for quite some time and spent a lot of time doing a lot of the workforce management, but don't hear it from me. Kevin, tell us a little bit about why you're better than Florian and why we should understand what's going on. I don't know
about that, Dave, but thanks for the introduction and confidence. So yeah. I pretty much started in workforce management when I was a teenager. My first, well, not in workforce management and customer service. Sorry working my way up my first job in high school was doing technical support for a small town internet service provider. Literally picking up the phone, dealing with customers and troubleshooting their issues.
I kind of worked my way out of that and into more of the technical side of things but stayed close to customer service the entire time and eventually Found my way into workforce management. It was kind of it wasn't anything I really intended at the time. It was never like the career path that I said, Hmm, I'm gonna be a workforce manager. But I
think there is a 100% ratio of people who never intended to be W f M of people that are in W F M. Yeah. But I got
in and I found that I really enjoyed the work and the skills and next thing I knew I had been working in there for seven in that field for seven years. And so that's kind of me in a nutshell.
And now you're helping you're helping others learn how to use the platform Yeah. And spending time with that here at Calabrio. So it's really great to have you be a part of this and we value your experience. And so the question I kind of want you to address a little bit, this is another question we get, is. I don't think people write down, you know, when you're in first grade and they say, what do you wanna be when you grow up? Nobody writes down, I want to be a W F M analyst. Right.
But at a certain point, people who get into contact center space, they do see that. They kind of maybe want to trend towards that. And so if you were to, if someone were to ask you, how could I kind of get into workforce management, maybe, how would you do that and what kind of skills might you focus on? Yeah. I
think probably the most important skills in workforce management are the communication and the people skills. W F M is about relationships. It's about your relationship with operations, with your HR teams with all of the other departments that make up the organization and make the business function. So first and foremost for me is communication skills. I think second is a good.
Analytical background, being able to think through problems and propose you know, and, and really work out the solution and be able, probably third in that would be,
Just working
on your Excel skills to be able to work with data and be able to present it in a way that is understood by your audience so that you're able to get your point across. Because a lot of what you do in W F M revolves around numbers and those can be difficult sometimes to,
to communicate. Yeah. So f one of the things I notice about US workforce management nerds is there seems to be really strong love for spreadsheets. And I'm being nice because some of us don't like Excel as much as the other
one. But can you express that in a pivot table, that idea, because that's what I need
in my life. And see, you stole my thunder, Kevin, because then you really get to know the W f N nerds when you talk about pivot tables. If pivot tables make you excited, you just might be a W F M nerd, right? Because it's a very common thread in what, what we do, right?
And I, you hear the story over and over again when you ask people how they get into this business, they said, well, I was working at the contact center and I was pretty good with Excel and one thing, you know, led to another and I was in workforce management. It seems to be very common. It's, it's the way I got into it.
I know that the, it's the way you guys kind of all fell into it and You know, that's the really interesting part is when people want to get into this space, you do have to have that analytical background. And then usually what they do is they find out that they kind of like the people part of it too. And that's what happened to me. I was, I wasn't into math. I didn't, I didn't, I hated math in high school. I was, I chose my college major specifically because there was no math.
That's, that, that's what's going on. And so there seems to be there. You know, we talk a lot about workforce management being like part art, part science. Some people really like the science part and some people really like the art part. I was definitely one of those people. Yeah.
And I think it's Also the curiosity, right? That comes, it's not just loving Excel or being able to love pivot tables, but it's also staying curious about the business, understanding why the goals, why the results, and through, you know, through your curiosity, just keep on digging and. Loving it. That's, that's how, that's how I fell into it, is because I wanted to understand why service level wasn't achieved on a given day and how staffing played a part in that.
And such a key word. Curiosity. Gosh, that word just keeps coming up over and over again when we talk about the kind of people that we wanna look. And so that's a great segue, Florian into meeting our third guest here. And he's been so good and so quiet. Joe Presutti, love, love that you're here, Joe. Joe's been doing this for a long time. He is led lots of W F M teams. But again, don't hear it from me. Hear it from Joe. Joe, tell us a little bit about, about your background. All right,
thanks Dave. So I came into the space because I, I, I was in a insurance company. I, they were starting a W F M team. I didn't know what it was. They were like, Hey, you should apply for this. So I did and I got an interview. They were asking questions about numbers and data. They really didn't talk about workforce management. It was basically just, you know, numbers and data. They hired me and I had to build a team, so I was, it was me as like the forecaster.
And then I was able to hire two real-time analysts and then we grew and we had, you know, we added on two more realtime analysts and two more forecasting and schedulers. So it was. Something where it started from the ground and we were able to build it from the ground up. And I think a lot of what we're you guys are talking about with analytical thinking and communication skills, that, that all, you know, goes into it.
And whenever you are building something like that from the ground up, you, you're, you're looking at people inside the organization who would be good for this role inside the organization. Cuz you don't really, at that point, it was 2004. There weren't really a lot of people out there externally who had the, the knowledge and skill related to workforce management that you would bring in from the outside. So I was looking inside for that kind of talent.
Yeah. And you know, we, we all know someone who is very analytical, but might not be the best choice, right. For this particular role. Now when the team gets larger, You have a, it's a little easier to kind of hide the analytical person behind the, in the dark room, behind the curtain, right? And please never talk to anyone. But when you're a smaller team, You, those analytical, analytical people can often have to be responsible for going out and dealing with the, the, the masses.
And, and yes, I know times have changed a little bit since we all kind of got into this group. Everything we used to do is very face-to-face, right? You always had the opportunity to walk up to someone's desk. And nowadays with remote work and hybrid working lots of different choices out there that, that spin that. So this question is kind of for you, Joe, and for you Florian. I know that.
A lot of times we get inquiries or I see them online and nobody asks me directly, but I see these on, on some of the message boards and things like that. Like, Hey, I, I have an interview for a W F M position coming up and what, what should I expect? And so Joe, let me start with you. When you were kind of bringing in those, those team members, what kind of things were part of the interview? You've already mentioned some of the skills that you looked for, but.
How did you really flesh those out and make sure that those people had those actual skills that you
needed? Well, I think the most important part, and I, you know, Kevin mentioned this is the people skills, so I was, I was asking questions about how they, how they are in a team environment, how they deal with conflict in a team environment, because that's ultimately what's going to happen. If you're a real-time analyst, you're going to have conflict with. The operations team, whenever you ask where somebody is, why aren't they on break at the right time?
Why aren't, why aren't they going to lunch? Why are they not ready for so long? Those kind of things, you have to be able to ask and be comfortable with that. So I was bringing in people who had very, they were friendly, people who understood data. Team players who could step in for someone else on the team if they weren't there or if they needed help.
So that, that was basically my, you know, and also, When I, we first started again, it 2004, we didn't have the chats in the operational, you know, world there. When we had calls in q I had to have my realtime analyst stand up and yell how many calls were in Q and people hated that. And even the people, even the realtime analysts hated that. So that was the kind of environment we were in.
So I wanted to bring in people that could do things like that and kind of put themselves out there, but also understand the data piece of it.
Now was this, was this like, did they just stand up and yell? Seven?
They would yell, they, well, I won't say we had it's proprietary with the, the, the companies we worked with, but they would yell at the company name how many calls were in queue and sometimes they would stand up and yell that we had four people and not ready on that, that in that guy. So it was just there a lot of yelling in the, in the call center.
So you guys could see though that there's no real great answer to this and so, Florian was, was there anything you, you did in particular, I know a big thing that comes across in a lot of these interviews is, are tests, right? We, we, we do tests. Did were, were you responsible for any of those?
Yeah, I've done a few of those. Truly. At first, the main thing I was looking for is somebody who has empathy that's gonna join a W F M team is somebody who knows what a high occupancy day feels like getting calls back to back. It's a, it's a different feeling. So I was looking for somebody who had some experience in the contact center as an agent, ideally so that they know that when they're impacting somebody's schedules, they know they're playing with.
People's, you know, lives day in and day out. But yes, were there occasions where we set up tests to test the the Excel skills or the chops overall? Absolutely. Where we, there's one specific interview process that comes to my mind where we had set up a. Excel sheet with millions of data points in it. Some erroneous data points, some real hidden gems in the, in the middle of of the data set.
And the goal was not only for the interviewee to figure out where the anomalies were in the data set, but also how they would present that data set at a more executive level and, and just overall build a sheet. So the guy we ended up hiring, Now works at Collabreo when, whenever we did this and had built this spreadsheet with 17 different tabs and a different approach to to the, to the challenges that were presented.
The explanation that he provided with it is really what sold the, the role for him. And yeah, years later still work with him and, and the dude is crushing it out there and he still likes you. He still loves me for some
reason. That. That's awesome. You know another thing that, as you're talking about empathy, I was thinking about was when you bring those pe, when you're talking to those people about W F M, you wanna bring someone in. If you're bringing 'em from the inside, even as well, that can keep a secret, that cannot, well it is not gonna go out to the floor and talk to their friends about what's happening.
Cuz you're gonna get information as a workforce management person around people's, you know, you know, terminations, people that are quitting. Maybe there's HR implications that you're aware of cuz you're scheduling time for them to be off the phones. You don't want somebody that's gonna come in and say, oh, my friend is being let go on Friday. I'm gonna go let them know that's happening. So you have to have some kind of, you know, tact when it comes to that kind of stuff too.
And that was something I asked about in every interview.
Okay. Tact. So I mean the, what it really comes down to is people skills, right? Right. The, the ability to stop for a second and say, okay, I'm dealing with human beings about this as well, and so, Now. Now, Kevin, when we were talking earlier, when we started talking about these tests, you, you, you, you got a little bit upset and I, I'm curious. That's a little salty
maybe. Yeah, a little
salty. That's a, that's a good term. Tell me about why this particular process of. Of testing employees or testing interviewees. Got you. A little bit hot on the collar. Don't get me wrong.
It's, it's really good to understand the fundamentals and the basics, and that's kind of what you're getting at when you're, you're trying to do a lot of these tests, but
a lot of times the.
The things that we're testing on are not things that are going to be part of your normal day. I feel like, at least in my situation, you know, we had W F M scheduling software. I never had to build a forecast by hand. You know, I never had to do things in Excel. Ever, you know, in the position I was in, I did things in Excel outside of that for other reasons, and my Excel skills were extremely valuable for that.
But the, I felt, the, the questions tend to be those sort of like w f m catch questions. You, you see a lot, you know, calculating occupancy and shrinkage and understanding, you know, the, those basic concepts. But in practice, they. They maybe aren't as useful, but still good to understand. So it just, it felt kind of like a gotcha.
In the interview when I'm going in there and they're like asking about occupancy and I have to, you know, wait a minute, I only know this terminology because of this particular, you know, W F M thing and like, we don't even use it as a metric. It's not a KPI that we're tracking right now.
Yeah. And yeah. And. I will say, like, what I see sometimes posted online is, are things like, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna have them take a forecast and then build a, a, a staffing requirement and then build a schedule on top of it. And it's
like, and then I might even put errors in my data when
I do that. Yes. That, that's just evil. That's evil. Yeah. And, and the, but what, what you see is, is you what hopefully the goal is. Is not to say, okay, this is a test that if you make less than a 90, you don't make it onto this. It's really about how do you apply the knowledge that you've learned in the past. Right. How can you get Yeah, it's about those analytics. Sorry. Yeah. No, no, no. It's the analytics. That's exactly what, it's just
thinking and working through problems, you know, how are you going to approach it and get to the solution and can you explain and justify how you
got there? I think that's the key point is how you explain, you know, what you are seeing. Because in the end, workforce management, yes, there's some analytics that go into it, but it's how you handle conversations with people. When it comes to scheduling or when it comes to your executive leadership team, is how you present challenges to them that have. Occurred and that you have identified in your contact center your ability to communicate with others.
Because workforce management partners with HR and with marketing and with finance and with the product team, you have to be able to talk to other people. You're, you know, oftentimes you think about the W F M team as what we alluded to earlier, the person in the dark room without the windows in the closet, just crunching numbers. But now really it's somebody who has empathy, who can who is curious and can talk to others.
Yeah. If I had to say like, what's my biggest challenge? What, like that I remember from workforce management, right? In all the years that I did it, it was, it was those discussions with the team leads about, I need so and so to get back on the phones. Like, I'm sorry. I know you want, you need to do a training with them, but we have to get these calls answered. It's, it's the conversations and the discussions I had. It was never figuring out how to create a weighted average in Excel.
It was never about crunching a particular forecast and making sure this part was weighted more heavily than the other. It was always about those conversations. And so, Joe, go ahead. You were gonna make a
point. Yeah, well, just what you were saying, I, you know, I had a daily, every morning we had a meeting and we had all the, all the different managers from every department come to that meeting. And W F M would explain here are priorities for the day. So if we're going to be asking later for people to help somewhere else, or maybe going home because we have too much staff on that day, it we, I had that. The, the leader of that call would RO have rotations.
So we would have an RTA do it one day, a forecaster, do it one day. I would do it one day. But I think having those conversations every day and people, we would explain, here's where we are, month of date on our service levels. Here's where we are in our abandoned numbers, you know, this is our attendance for the day.
We would give all that information in that morning meeting we met for a half hour, and I think that when we started doing that, A lot of those conversations were a lot easier to have cause people understood where it was coming from and when we would go out to a team lead in during the day and say, look, we're gonna cancel your team meeting today because of this. They, they understood why.
Yeah, I, I think those are really good points. There's like a sort of this balance between the needs of the business and recognizing that these are individual people ultimately, and at some level they're individual problems that need to be dealt with. So definitely having those, those skills is really
important. Right. Yeah. The. It's, it's the age old question that I'm sure you guys have said hundreds of times in your career, if not more, is if they understand the why. Yeah, it makes it so much easier to digest. And, and you know, I'll admit, at the beginning of my career, I wasn't very good at explaining the why. It was like, because they're on my butt to get these people back on the phones.
That's why, because I said so, but if, but if we, if we do a better job, and, and that's the thing is sometimes. You know, contact centers can be understaffed for many months in a row and everybody's feeling the pressure and it's like, seriously, I haven't had a one-on-one with my agents in like months and now you want to cancel this one again. And yeah. I, I, I'm sorry. I understand right tho those were the harder conversations
and you know, there were times where you know, we would have. Those conversations where we wanted, we wanted to cancel a meeting where we wanted to pull somebody onto the phone. Cause we had calls in queue and I always told people we can discuss and argue about this later, but let's, when we ask someone to be on the phone, put 'em on the phone, there's a reason for it. And. Right or wrong. That's what I wanted them to do.
Like I I, we can discuss it later and, and if it, if we were wrong for doing it, then we can talk about that later. Cuz I, you know, w f m in my, in my world has always been responsible for those SLAs and those ASAs. So I wanted to them to understand that we're never going to ask for something because we just are trying to get at you. But if there's a problem with it, do it and we'll talk about it later.
Oh, I asked for stuff just to get at 'em. No, I'm just kidding. I wouldn't do that. Don't do that. WFM is out there. Listen, go ahead Kevin. You were gonna say.
Yeah, I, I think that like, especially with operations, you know, it's an N W F M, it's so easy to get focused on the numbers portion of it too. And I would just wanted to throw the thought out there to encourage people to like, focus on the behaviors that change the numbers and not so much the numbers.
I, I
just feel like a lot of times you're talking to, you know, people about your call volume or your abandon rate or other things like that, and that doesn't translate to what they need to do to actually affect change. It's much better to talk about the behaviors we need to do, you know, we need agents to wrap up faster. We need these other things to happen. And
address those. Yeah. It goes back to that skill that we talked about earlier, that insatiable curiosity, right? That, yeah, why is this happening and what, and what can I do to d to, you know, when we just start accepting status quo, that's when, that's when things get really, really goofy. So
I think you know, the, the, the. There are three components that I would always think about whenever building a workforce management team. And we've talked about one quite a bit. It's the people, the people you hire and the people you work with. That's definitely one of the, the components, but the other two. Our processes and the technology, so processes that you put in place and you know, Joe, what you were talking about, reviewing metrics on a daily or on a weekly and monthly basis.
NBRs, qbr, all the various reviews you could do. The processes the, the, the goals that are, Put in place, right? For adherence numbers or for your SLAs, reviewing your SLAs from time to time, is it still good to have a very aggressive service level of 80 20? What, you know, is usually considered as the, as the norm out there, but truly doesn't impact quality much. And then technology, of course, you know, we are a technology company and doing workforce management.
Work without a workforce management platform is incredibly tricky. Doing it all via Excel is challenging. So of course the technology, but also the integration of your w fm platform with the a c d with a chat platform or your CRM of choice. Those three components I, I would always think are key to a successful workforce management team, people, process, and technology.
For sure. And you know, I think that when, and I talk to Kevin about this very, very often, you know, as you are running this and you are staying up on, you know, changes and making sure that you're up on the latest things that are going on, you also wanna make sure that you are catering those processes toward the, the software that you're using and not trying to. Change the software to meet the, the processes that you have in your sender.
I, I work with so many customers who just say, I, you know, we've done this for the last 10 years. This is how, this is how we do it. And when you get a tool like Collabreo, you, you want to see what the tool can do and then maybe look at changing processes to that continuous education, continuous improvement piece of the, of the wheel there. Yeah, you can hear
the pain in Joe's voice when he says that because that's, that's what it's like to try and implement a solution with, with with people. And you know what, we're all guilty of it. You, you like something the way it is and you know that it's really a mindset more than it is necessarily anything else is going in and feeling feeling confident that we can get those pieces done. Just to
add to that, I feel like the collaboration with other departments also comes into play on that a lot, especially if you're talking about an HR m s integration. And a lot of times when you're talking about your initial project deployment, it's a lot easier to get the energy and motivation to. You know, discuss and fix your processes for the new technology, then roll out the technology and then have to look at revisiting your processes down
the road. Yeah. When big changes happen, that's also time to make big decisions. Right. And, you know, reevaluate your skills, reevaluate your, your, your, things like that. And so, absolutely. All right, guys, the last point I kind of want to talk about is when we look at workforce management and career progression, right? So I'd love to think that there's a bunch of W f M people out here listening to the podcast and, and wanna learn more.
If you guys, and I'm gonna kind of round robin this, so you know, Joe, we'll start with you. If you were to give someone some advice on how to get promoted within the W F M ranks, You know, in 30 seconds or less, what would your answer be? I would
say understand the contact center, understand the metrics, the KPIs, the people. Use, use your, your, your coworkers to understand the tool. So if I, if I want to, if I'm a real-time analyst and I wanna be a forecaster, I need to work with the forecasters on my W f M team to understand what, how those things work and why it's important. So whenever I get in that position, I know what I'm doing and I understand what the numbers mean and how they impact the overall contact center. Right.
And so Kevin, same question.
I've always been fond of the saying, don't come to me with problems. Come to me with solutions. So, find a problem within your organization that's within your scope and that you're able to you know, address or come up with some solution for it and throw yourself out there. You know, it may not be the perfect solution, but you know, find a problem, try to fix it.
Have, have that person go, ah, this actually, this person might have something here. Okay. All right. So Florian, you got the final word here. Let's if you, if you were giving someone, someone some advice on how to get promoted within the ranks, what would you say?
If I was to go back to my younger self wanting to become a W F M manager I would say, WFM managers are people leader first. So work on your communication skills on ensuring that you know what it feels like. Put yourself in the shoes of a W F M admin or an agent when you are making decisions.
But overall, be a, a coach a mentor that has a vision for where you want to take your WFM team, how you want to scale it, the processes you want to put in place, the technology you want to put into your, in your WFM team. And and yeah, focus on those three things and you'll, you'll go far.
Wow, three, three really great pieces of advice there from from some people who've been, been through this and, and have really done it. So first of all, I wanna say thank you guys so much for joining me. I appreciate it. And hopefully our listeners are gonna get a ton of great information out of this particular piece.
I always like to say thank you to our listeners for spending some time with us, and hopefully you found this informative and we're always looking for another great idea for what we, what people want to hear on the podcast. So if you have an idea, get in touch with us. Just go to collaborator.com, literally find any email address and, and shoot it to us. It'll, it'll find its way where it needs to go. So we really do app. Appreciate the time. Kevin, Florian, Joe, thank you guys so much.
It's a pleasure working with you guys day in and day out and I think that our customers are really gonna benefit quite a bit from the conversation. So appreciate you from the Collabreo team. Thank you guys so much for spending some time with us and we will see you guys on the next episode of working Smarter with Calabria. Thanks everybody.