3 Key Trends in Workforce Management that will Transform Your Contact Centre
With Dave Hoekstra, WFM Evangelist at Calabrio
Show Notes
Dave Hoekstra is a Workforce Management (WFM) Evangelist at Calabrio. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the contact centre industry, much of that spent in Workforce Management.
Dave spends much of his time talking with Contact Centre Leaders and staying abreast of the latest developments in WFM. As a result, Dave has deep insight into the trends in WFM which will transform your contact centre.
Dave’s Top 3 Trends:
There’s a shift to empowering agents to have more of a say in their schedule, to lift their engagement (03:59).
The computing power of the cloud is unlocking functionality which has never before been cost effective. Like Speech Analytics now able to transcribe 100% of calls, and WFM Planners being able to change the roster throughout the day (16:56).
With the ease of updating the roster in WFM software, WFM teams are able to focus on the bigger picture. Like working with HR to find the right type of agent (25:55).
You'll Learn:
The problems associated with letting agents design their schedules (05:14).
Why employee empowerment and employee engagement will only become more important (07:00).
Dave’s key question when he’s asked for job advice (09:33).
The piece of technology that has ruined us all (11:05).
What Dave thinks of the quote from Paul Stockford (Director of Research at the National Association of Call Centers) - that contact centres have been “white collar sweatshops” - and the change Dave’s seeing across centres (13:27).
What new functionality is coming to contact centre software (22:30).
How we’re almost at the tipping point where centres will be able to create better Customer Experience for lower cost (30:14).
Connect with Dave here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davehoekstrawfm/
Tune in to Dave’s podcast, ‘Working Smarter: Presented by Calabrio’: on Apple, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.
If your priorities include strengthening employee engagement, lifting customer experience, or increasing your focus on coaching and development, I can help you out with a few ideas that you can steal. Send me an email (at blairs@bravatrak.com) and we can organize a 15-minute call over Zoom or Teams.
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak, the Future of Coaching in Contact Centres. The BravaTrak system measures that improves coaching effectiveness, so you strengthen employee engagement and boost customer experience.
Today, I'm joined by Dave Hoekstra. Dave is a Workforce Management (WFM) Evangelist at Calabrio, and he's also the host of the ‘Working Smarter’ podcast. Dave lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas.
The first thing Dave told me when I met him is that he has the coolest job in the world, which I think is a pretty great place to be.
Today, Dave is here to talk about the current trends in workforce management. So Dave, welcome along. Great to have you here.
Dave Hoekstra (00:52)
Thanks for having me Blair. Really glad to be here.
Blair Stevenson (00:54)
Cool. So just for listeners, as a starting point, tell us a bit about your background and your expertise.
Dave Hoekstra (00:59)
Well, let me first clarify. When I say I have the coolest job in the world, I don't think that that list is the same for each person. And for me, I think I have the coolest job in the world, but it definitely doesn't show up in the top 100 of most other people.
My role with Calabrio is Workforce Management Evangelist, and even beyond that, Product Evangelist, which basically means I get to talk about all of these cool technologies with customers. Whether it's in a sales capacity or in a consultative capacity, or even just fun, like doing things like this and talking to you. I get to do a lot of really cool things.
My background is in call centers. I started back in the late nineties, I was an agent at a call center for a pager company. So you remember those little beepers we all used to wear on our hip? That's how long ago that was.
(01:55)
And I worked my way up. Along the way, I discovered Workforce Management and it really intrigued me. I loved the balance between math and people. There is a lot of science, but there's a lot of art involved in Workforce Management.
I spent a good chunk of my career doing that, and then transitioned over to the vendor side - kind of the Darth Vader, the dark side. I spent some time in sales, but that really exposed me to a lot of different contact centres. A lot of different organizations. So I got to hear a lot of problems, and a lot of solutions, and a lot of ways to approach new things, which really expanded and opened my eyes to the vast world of contact center engagement.
And here I am. I get to do awesome things like this and I couldn't be happier. So I'm really glad to be part of it.
Blair Stevenson (02:44)
Fantastic. So obviously your experiences with Calabrio inform what you're noticing. So what is Calabrio and what does it do?
Dave Hoekstra (02:55)
Calabrio, depending on what acronym the various consultant groups have decided to call our software, we're Workforce Engagement Management - WEM - what we used to call WFO, Workforce Optimization.
We essentially provide the call recording, quality monitoring, analytics, Workforce Management, and a lot of other various accoutrements that go along with running and maintaining an effective contact center.
So we provide that for hundreds of customers around the world. We have hundreds of thousands of seats that do that. And we have amazing customers all around the world that do amazing things in their contact centers. So we provide that service for them and we're happy to do so.
Blair Stevenson (03:43)
Very cool. You talked about hundreds of thousands of seats. You've got a good view of things. So what are the trends you're noticing, the current trends in workforce management?
Dave Hoekstra (03:59)
Not to date this episode of the podcast, but where we sit right now, we're kind of at what we hope to be the beginning of the end of the pandemic. There's a lot of talk about the return to work, going back into the office. What's going to happen there.
But this is the tail end of one of the biggest movements that we've seen around the idea of employee engagement, right? Employee engagement has always been a thing, but we've only recently had the software to support it. So now we're starting to look into the idea of what if we gave employees a choice on their schedule, on the hours that they work, the things that they do while they're here.
(04:44)
Employee mental health has really started to play a big part in what we do. And being able to give the employee the choice - or even in some cases, the illusion of choice, but we won't mention that - the idea that they have a voice in the overall process of scheduling, working, doing their day-to-day tasks, vacation enablement and things like that. That's a huge trend that we're starting to see, right?
One of the things that I know that everybody has deep doubt about is this idea of self scheduling, or what we cheekily refer to as Uber or Lyft-style scheduling. And the idea that the employee should just be able to design whatever schedule they want whenever they want, and everybody's happy. But there's a bit of a problem with that.
(05:38)
We tend to see that when you look at Uber, the way Uber came up in the industry, they have the ability to raise and lower demand on their employee at any given time, right? If there are more people needing rides, they can charge more money, which incentivizes drivers to get out on the road.
Contact centers can't really do that, right? I can't generate more calls and I can't really generate more pay for my agents. So we kind of get into this push and pull that's back and forth. So it's really important that we strike a balance.
And that's one of the big trends that I have really seen - is being able to step back and look at the balance between demand and the ability to schedule and make our employees be where they need to be. And so whenever these contact centers are out there looking for this Uber-style, we do have to always remember that we don't have the built-in advantage to open and close the floodgates, as it were, to create that surge pricing.
It would be great if we could. If we could pay more for people when we really need them. But I don't think we're close to cracking that code yet.
Blair Stevenson (06:52)
I don't think so either. So why do you think employee empowerment, employee engagement has become so important?
Dave Hoekstra (07:00)
It's funny. Whenever I go to meet with customers and I talk to them, there's always the dreaded ‘M’ word, right? Millennials. "Millennials are ruining the contact center industry because these young punks, they want what they want and they won't take no for an answer".
And the thing is, Blair, for you and I, who are a little bit older than the Millennial side, this is no different than anything you or I ever wanted in a role. You go back into even the fifties, and people getting up, driving into an office every day, sixties, seventies, eighties, those people all wanted the same thing. They wanted to work when they needed to, be home with their families, or doing their own personal things when they wanted to, right?
(07:44)
And over time, that was the way we did things. It was the "Sit down, shut up and do what I tell you" method of contact center management. That's where I grew up. My first schedule in a call center was 2:00 PM to 11:00 PM with Tuesdays and Thursdays off. Literally the worst schedule you could possibly imagine. And I hated it. My sleep schedule was off all the time.
I wanted a better schedule. So I would go and ask, "Can I have a better schedule?". And they're like, "No, you haven't worked here long enough, and your stats aren't good enough" and all this stuff.
Well, here's the thing. What's happening now is people like you and me are finally getting to the point where we are now running the show. And these people who have grown up with getting - I hate to say abused, it's not abused - but getting pushed down and told what to do for the first 15, 20 years of our career, we are the people that are now running the show at the call centers, right?
(08:44)
You're seeing VP of Customer Service. You're seeing Customer Engagement Director positions. These are the people that are starting to be in charge, and those people remember.
And so we're starting to see a lot of push, especially as a software vendor. We're seeing a lot of push from the customer base, “We need tools that support better schedules. We need tools that support more smarter QM and smarter coaching”.
It's no longer, “I can just tell you to accept what I say”, because nowadays in a contact center - especially now with remote working and work from home - if another call center is offering me a dollar more an hour, I'm going to move because you're treating me like crap. And I don't want to have to put up with it anymore. It used to not be that easy to move around.
(09:33)
So I think that's a really big thing that a lot of things are working for. And ultimately, it comes down to that one phrase, 'work-life balance'. I have people all the time say, "Dave, should I take this job? Or should I move over there?". My first question is, "How's your work-life balance?".
That is the real consideration that is now being managed from the lowest level employee to the highest level employee. We've got to take care of that balance to make sure. So that's the reason we're seeing a lot of this employee empowerment really ramp up and take it to the next level.
Blair Stevenson (10:06)
Yeah, I agree. I think you're exactly right. People like us who didn't like the way that we were managed are now in in control. And at the same time, the Millennials coming through are less likely to put up with it too.
Dave Hoekstra (10:25)
Right, absolutely. I mean, gosh, my son is 24 years old and the amount of conversations he and I have about his job and how he doesn't want to be there. I, at least, went a couple of years before complaining about my job when I was getting started.
He makes it about three weeks and he's like, "Okay, this is not what I'm hoping it would be". Now don't get me wrong, he's a great kid. But that's exactly what we're dealing with. The amount of tolerance of being told to "Sit down and shut up and do what we tell you" is so much shorter nowadays than it was.
And there's one reason, Blair, and this reason has ruined us all. And it's right here in my pocket. [Brings out smartphone]. This thing right here has messed everything up for employers all across the world. Because I can now reach into every single person's pocket, I can give them a beautiful schedule. I can trade my schedule. I can request a vacation day. I can do it from my couch.
There are jobs you can do - like if you're looking at like DoorDash Uber, Lyft - I can do a job with only this in my pocket. And that was not a reality, even 10 years ago. So that's the problem. This thing has ruined the monolithic employer, from the very top.
So I'm all for it. The more we can do to make people happy, I'm in.
Blair Stevenson (11:55)
Totally. Fantastic. Dave, what you're saying just reminds me of a quote I came across from a fellow by the name of Paul Stockford, who's the Director of Research at the National Association of Call Centers. A few years ago he referred to contact centers as "white collar sweatshops".
And I think that was a fair comment, at least a few years ago. So I've got a couple of questions. Do you think that is still the case given what's going on? And in terms of employee engagement, moving forward, what will Workforce Management enable in terms of helping the industry to move further away from that reputation?
Dave Hoekstra (12:40)
So the answer to your question is "Yes". I still think that's a possibility.
One of the things, if you've ever heard me talk or in anything that I've ever done, one of the places I reference people back to a lot is - there's a big website out there called Reddit, I'm sure a lot of people have heard it - and there's a subreddit called Tales from Call Centers (https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromcallcenters/), where people - generally it's agents - go there and complain about their job.
I mean, let's get realistic. There's very rarely someone posting like, "Hey, how do I boost my coaching effectiveness". It's usually agents complaining about their schedule or their Team Lead or something like that. And there are plenty of people out there that fit this exact employee description, the "White collar sweatshop".
(13:27)
What I think is changing, Blair, is the percentage of call centers that fall under that category. If you look 15 years ago, it was probably a good solid 85 to 90% of call centers were very much that sweatshop mentality. It was very rare for me to go into an organization and be like, "Wow, they really do it differently here".
It was really eye opening when you'd go into a call center that really treated their employees well. You know, "They're paying really well and they give them great schedules and they're they're never understaffed", right? Those were always very rare.
Nowadays, it's much more about a 50-50 proposition. And I think that number is even trending downwards a little bit more.
(14:14)
It took a long time for contact centers to realize how much attrition actually costs them. And it's crazy to think about it. We've been preaching it for decades, that it costs more to bring in a new employee than it does to retain an effective one. But it just didn't ring true. It didn't ring home.
And it goes back to my earlier point, the people that were running call centers back then were the people who grew up in that era, right? "Well, back in my day, when I was taking calls, you did what they told you to". We don't have those people doing that anymore.
So yes, I still think that Paul's quote is very correct. But the big positive is that the trend going in the right direction. I talk to a lot of people that are really concerned about giving their agents good schedules, that are really concerned about making sure that we're not asking the single mom who has two kids in daycare to work evenings and never see her children. We're seeing that is taken into account when we're building out these day-to-day schedules.
(15:30)
Now, it doesn't change anything on the other side, the calls and the emails and the chats. They're still coming in. They still are coming in at that timeframe. But I'm seeing organizations are investing the right money in the right tools to make sure that we're not abusing these people anymore.
It used to be that the reward was the job, right? Now, the reward goes beyond the job. And now the job is starting to become the baseline of what is acceptable and then bringing up the level beyond that. So I think it's a great quote, but I'm really happy to see the trend going in the right direction.
Blair Stevenson (16:09)
Yeah. Likewise. We started out talking about trends in Workforce Management, so what's another key trend that you're noticing?
Dave Hoekstra (16:19)
This one is kind of funny because it's one I've only started talking about recently.
For years we've talked about the cloud. And don't worry if you're watching this, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the cloud is where you should go, because you already know that. Especially again, with the pandemic, we found out that the cloud is almost indispensable.
But 10 years ago, when we started talking about the cloud, it was all about the portability, It was, "Oh, you can log on from home. You can log on from the office, if you're out and about, and you've got your laptop you can do your work from anywhere". And we loved the cloud for that reason.
(16:56)
But recently, the importance of the cloud has taken a step beyond that, and it's now the computing power that's available. So let me kind of paint a little picture for you.
15 years ago, if you wanted to buy straight Workforce Management, nothing else beyond Workforce Management, and your contact center had five sites and maybe 5,000 agents, that Workforce Management deployment would require probably in the range of seven to eight servers to manage it. And you had to put it in your data center. And that data center had to be connected via WAN (Wide Area Network) to all the different areas.
And then, let's say, that contact center experienced explosive growth over the next couple of years, and they went from 5,000 to 8,000 agents. You'd have to go buy another four or five servers. And it was complicated and messy and professional services costs and all that stuff.
(17:55)
What the cloud has given is expandability. So no longer is that even a problem. If you have the cloud and you call Calabrio and say, "Hey, we're adding 3000 agents", honestly, our question is, "Why are you calling us? Just do it". Because it doesn't matter anymore. And that expandability of capacity has a huge impact on the speed at which our industry can react to things.
But even beyond that, there is a huge value in the computational power of the cloud. What I mean by that is, again, let's take an example like speech analytics. So in a contact center, we listen to all the audio and then we transcribe it. We put it through a transcription engine so that we have a written account of what's happened. And then we would analyze that.
That used to take - you want to talk about eight servers for that? No, no, no - this was 30 or 40 servers to be able to do this. And usually that would be only on maybe 15 to 30% of your calls.
(19:05)
With the power that, for example, Amazon Web Services gives to our organization, we can now transcribe 100% of those calls in a matter of minutes, because there are warehouses full of servers that are working on this thing.
And what it's done is it’s ramped up the speed at which technology can now apply itself. We haven't even thought of the next cool thing that's going to happen as a result of this computational power.
But a good example of it is the speech analytics. You could not conceivably do that even 10 years ago in a reasonable fashion. You were lucky to get a small percentage of your calls transcribed, because you would just have to have servers just chugging away in a data center for hours to do that. And now we can do that all in a matter of minutes.
And that's what it's going to lead to. Whether we're talking about QM (Quality Management) and recording or Workforce Management.
(20:10)
When we talk about Workforce Management, that computational power is going to allow us to instead of looking at a schedule one time of day, and determining; Who can move where? Can we let some people go home? And can we move some breaks and lunches? And can we update the forecast? We can look at that thing every minute and re-reshuffle the deck and see where things go.
And it's going to enable more employee engagement. It's going to lead to more efficient schedules for contact centers. We're already seeing that with Calabrio today, the ability for the agent to just open up a screen and go, "Oh, it looks like I can go home early". And they do it.
That used to take hours, Blair. It used to take a person like me walking around with a clipboard saying, "Does anybody want to go home? Anybody, anybody?" And then three people would raise their hand. I'm like, "Get out of here".
We can do that all in a matter of just [a click of the fingers]. And it's only because we have the computational power behind it to be able to figure those things out on the fly, instead of it literally being a nerd like me with an Excel spreadsheet, hammering away in a dark corner.
Blair Stevenson (21:13)
It's been an astonishing change over the last 10 years or so.
Dave Hoekstra (21:18)
It's amazing. I mean, I’ve said this phrase so many times, if I had what we have today in 1999, when I was just cracking into that, I would be running every call center in the world, because I would have so many skins on the wall with the power and the things that are available.
That sounds a little egotistical, but the idea is that speech analytics is still magical technology to me. It's magical because being able to understand what the voice of the customer is, what they're saying, the sentiment attached to it.
I mean, oh my gosh, do you know how much work we went through in the mid to late nineties to try and figure out why people were calling? I mean, it was weeks of study to get even one small answer. And now we literally have that answer within minutes. That's the exciting part for me.
Blair Stevenson (22:19)
So practically speaking, and if we kind of think forward over the next three years, outside of speech analytics and so on, what else do you think computing power is going to enable in that three year period?
Dave Hoekstra (22:30)
To me, the real future of what this looks like is going to be the integrations that are going to now be available. For example, if in my contact center I had a nice CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) environment set up - remember when the account number popping up when the person called was revolutionary technology?
Well now the AI and the machine learning behind that and the integrations to CRM - whether you're talking about Salesforce or Dynamics or Zendesk or any of that information - the idea that that computational power is going to be able to reach into an alternate third party database, ingest that information, perform some machine learning routines on it.
And be able to direct the customer to the absolute perfect answer, whether it's a chat bot or an AI virtual concierge. Or the agent that's answering the phone call, "Based on all the information we have, here's the answer", and boom, it's going to be there.
(23:42)
10 years ago this was an enormous task. It was possible, but it required hiring third-party integrators and paying them millions of millions of dollars to do. And now this technology is basically built into almost everything we do, because of the cloud. All we have to do is start teaching it to do it.
And so these integrations are going to be big. The machine learning and AI capacity of the cloud, that's where things are going.
And so whether we're talking about Workforce Management, we could be talking about schedule enablement, being able to Zoom, and really place people where they need to go, and creating hyper-efficient schedules beyond what we were able to today. Or being able to kind of reach into any area and really understand all the mountain of data that we have.
(24:36)
That's what I'm excited about. Calabrio is looking into those kinds of things. We have a machine learning team that is looking at really cool applications. I think one of the ones we did, we ran an experiment. We had agents in a contact center wear Fitbits. And if the Fitbit recognized that their heart rate was elevated for a certain amount of time, it would automatically schedule a break on their schedule.
Remember back when Google was trying to figure out Gmail and it was an out there concept, and now everybody has a Gmail. Those are the kinds of things where the adoption rate is going to just accelerate like crazy. And we could not be more ready for that kind of stuff.
Blair Stevenson (25:20)
That is fantastic. One last question, because we've been talking for awhile, Workforce Management hasn't been a sexy application, really. Is there anything in particular developing within the industry that might fit that category?
To be honest, a lot of the stuff you're talking about is pretty cool, but is there anything else in particular?
Dave Hoekstra (25:55)
We've already talked about it a little bit, but the ability for the agent to be a part of the process. Whether it's creating their own schedule, or taking a base schedule and managing it a little bit.
It's the simplest feature, but Calabrio has the ability to move my own lunch, right? I'm a little hungry today. I'd love to move my lunch up an hour. And as long as it fits with the staffing management of the day, we allow it. And that's not sexy in the idea, but what that unlocks for context centers is.
It's always been an argument with management. I remember I would send an email, "Can I take my break a little bit later? Or can I go home a little bit earlier?". And if I'm lucky that person is sitting at their desk, and then if I'm luckier, they have a decent enough program in front of them that tells them what the staffing looks like for the rest of the day, and then they'll go, "Yeah, you can". And then they go in and they draw on the schedule and make the updates.
We can do that all in a matter of five seconds now. Completely automated without anybody on the backend. That's not sexy in the idea because we've always been able to do that. What's sexy in the idea is that it frees up that WFM Planner to focus more on what's happening tomorrow, or "Did I double check with marketing to make sure that we've got all of tomorrow taken care of?".
(27:37)
So it's not the idea of the kind of "Check the box of what we're doing". It's the trickle down effect of freeing people up from doing minutia and really focusing on the big picture items. You no longer need an eight person WFM team to just manage incoming requests all the live long day.
Now you can have a three-person WFM team. And all three of those people are focusing on working with HR on finding the right type of employee, making sure that our policies match what our agents expect out of things.
So, again, the idea is not super sexy. It's the broad funnel of new ideas that's going to spurt from this automation that's built into our products. That's what it's going to allow.
Nobody thought that when Steve Jobs got on stage and said, "Hey, we've combined the phone and an internet application into one little box" that 12, 13 years later, it's the most powerful device that anybody could have in their hand. And we all take it for granted. None of us stop and think about how powerful this little sucker is.
(29:01)
And that's where we want to get with nerdy applications like WFM. No longer do you have to think about how much time you spend scheduling. Or no longer do you have to think about "Is my service level between 3:45 and 4 o'clock going to fit the match", or "What's my ASA". That stuff is going to become afterthoughts.
We're now going to be able to think about things like, "All right, how do we put our best coached agents in the right spot? How can we make sure that our call routing matches what we need to get from our customer base? Oh, our customer base is now chatting with us on Facebook messenger. Let's automatically move some people over here because we know that that influx is going to happen at this time".
Those are the things that trickle down. It's going to be relatively low effort. And that's what we want to get to, is removing a lot of the barriers to that minutia and really freeing people up to start thinking about the next cool thing that can happen.
Blair Stevenson (30:04)
So that's going to have a huge impact on Agent Experience, and also on Customer Experience.
Dave Hoekstra (30:14)
Right. And that's what we want. The ultimate goal of any contact center, if you boil it all down to brass tacks, is you want to provide the highest level of customer experience at the lowest cost. That's ultimately what every contact center in the world is all about.
And the problem is those two have always been at war with each other. You’ve got to spend a lot of money to give this level of customer service. And right now, we're almost at that tipping point where it's no longer going to be, "You have to sacrifice quality for price". You now are going to get to the point where it's like, "Things are going to happen and we can start trickling into that next phase". And that's exactly what it is.
It's the next thing that's super exciting for everybody. And really being able to deliver on the promise of the highest level of customer service at the lowest possible cost.
Blair Stevenson (31:15)
Fantastic. It has been a real pleasure having a chat with you today, Dave. Thank you very much for coming along.
Now for listeners. You'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Dave on LinkedIn, you also find the link to his LinkedIn profile in the description too (https://www.linkedin.com/in/davehoekstrawfm/).
Additionally, if you would like to listen to Dave's 'Working Smarter' podcast, you'll find a link to his podcast there as well (tune in on Apple, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app).
Now, if your priorities this year include strengthening employee engagement, boosting customer experience and enhancing agent resilience, I can help you out with a few ideas that you can steal.
Send me an email (at blairs@bravatrak.com) and we can organize a 15-minute call over Zoom or Teams. My contact details are also the episode description below.
Well, that's it from us today. Thanks again to Dave. Have a great week.
Dave Hoekstra (32:11)
Thanks everybody.