Staffing Your Workforce in an Omni-Channel World Society of Workforce Planning Professionals

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05/05/2020 Staffing Your Workforce in an Omni-Channel World – Society of Workforce Planning Professionals
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Sta�ng Your Workforce in an Omni-Channel World
By Eric Hagaman, Aspect Software
STAFFING YOUR WORKFORCE IN
AN OMNI - CHANNEL WORLD
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Human beings are communicating through more
channels than were ever dreamed of 20 years ago, and
rapid smartphone adoption has put all of these channels
in the palms of our hands. With 30% of worldwide
mobile users having smartphones, consumers have
come to expect ubiquitous communication in the voice
channel as well as in newer modes of communication
such as chat, SMS, email, social media, and dedicated
apps. In this increasingly omni-channel world, the
contact center is becoming the defacto clearinghouse
for customer communication, but with new customer
interaction channels being required on a significant
scale, the old voice workforce models are in need of
renovation. Workforce planning professionals must
at a required number of agents for each time period to
meet a 70% in 30 seconds service level goal. Using this
method, the staffing looks like the Current Industry
Practice line on the charts on the next page.
However, when an agent’s workload goes from one chat
session to two and then to three, new dynamics come
into play, including the following:
Agent unproductive time is now impacting
multiple customer chats.
As mentioned above, from the perspective of a
customer, the agent is now responding more
slowly because he or she is working on replies to
multiple other customers interwoven with their
responses to a single customer.
The agent is now switching mental and business
contexts as his or her attention moves from one
customer to another, and some time is spent
getting back up to speed on the contents of that
conversation before composing a reply. For
complex concepts, this time can be significant.
When handling three or more simultaneous
chats, the agent can easily get confused and
have to reread previous messages.
The actual number of chat staff required to meet
expected service levels (taking into account all of the
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05/05/2020 Staffing Your Workforce in an Omni-Channel World – Society of Workforce Planning Professionals
https://swpp.org/fall-2014-on-target/staffing-your-workforce-in-an-omni-channel-world/ 2/4
adapt to the unfamiliar and often complex dynamics of
conversations in these channels in order to optimize
staffing for those most coveted objectives of great
customer experience and low cost.
The contact center industry has spent decades refining
the science of forecasting, scheduling, and intra-day 
tracking of adherence for inbound and outbound voice
calls. The next frontier is creating the same level of 
understanding for management of the workforce within
each and across all of these channels. Unfortunately,
these other channels don’t have the same
characteristics as the voice channel, and you can’t use
the same planning and forecasting techniques to
manage the workforce in these non-voice channels.
Let’s consider the chat channel. Forrester notes that
chat is the third most heavily used form of interactive
customer communication after voice and email, but of 
these it is by far the fastest growing at about 8% per
year. Unlike the voice channel, it is common practice to
assign multiple simultaneous conversations to a single
agent in the chat channel. Assigning one chat contact to
an agent is generally considered underutilization of
resources due to gaps in time spent waiting for
customer message composition after the agent has
composed and sent his or her reply. In the simple
example below, a single chat channel is assigned to an
agent, and the agent does, in fact spend quite a bit of
time waiting idly for the customer to compose the next
message.
Single Channel Chat
Now let’s consider two customer chat channels with
customer composition times and agent composition
times similar to those above. From the agent
perspective, this is quite a different experience.
Two Channel Chat
As you can see, the agent has significantly less wait
time, in fact in several cases he or she is going
immediately from composing for one channel to
composing for the other channel. The customers also
dynamics of the chat channel) is shown in the Actual
Staff Required line below.
You can see that the actual number of staff required is
much higher than what would be estimated using
current industry practice. Without access to a tool that 
incorporates the complex mathematics of chat, the
workforce planner would have dramatically understaffed
the chat team.
Another way to look at this is from the perspective of
service levels. In the chart below, the Current Industry
Practice line shows that the contact center would be
well short of their required service level if they were to
schedule staff based on estimating handle time and
using voice channel methods. Aspect has developed a
new channel modeling tool that gives workforce
planners a powerful new weapon in their workforce
planning arsenal. Since the mathematics of chat are too
complex to solve algebraically, it uses a Monte Carlo
simulation technique to make accurate chat staffing
forecasts. The Aspect Multi-Chat Calculator, takes into
account all of the dynamics unique to chat. As shown
below, the actual service level would be very close to
being met throughout the day if we staffed using the
Multi-Chat Calculator as depicted in the Aspect Model
line.
05/05/2020 Staffing Your Workforce in an Omni-Channel World – Society of Workforce Planning Professionals
https://swpp.org/fall-2014-on-target/staffing-your-workforce-in-an-omni-channel-world/ 3/4
 
 
start to feel the effects with slightly longer waits for the
agent’s response.
If we were to add a third chat channel to the mix, the
agent would have virtually no wait time, and customers
would start to experience noticeably longer delays in 
agent response. When an agent works on multiple
simultaneous chat sessions, each session’s handle time
is increased over the duration that it would be if the
agent were chatting with customers one at a time. The
average session time of an agent increases with the
number of simultaneous sessions in which the agent is
engaged. Further, the number of simultaneous sessions
in which an agent is engaged increases with the number
of chats offered. The unfortunate and inescapable
conclusion is that the average chat session time is
mathematically related (in a very complicated way) to
the number of chats offered. That is not the case in a
traditional voice-only contact center where the AHT for a
call is assumed to be independent of the number of calls
offered, so you can’t use traditional contact center 
Erlang-based thinking for chat.
Without any other guidance, most workforce managers
would use some simple rules of thumb to estimate
staffing levels required to meet service level targets.
Their estimates would likely be rooted in their
experience with voice, and here is a specific example to
consider on how you could get into trouble trying to staff
for chat using traditional voice models. A team of chat
agents has been assigned to provide customerservice,
with a maximum of three concurrent chats per agent.
Using the pattern of historical chat volume, the
workforce planner observes the average handle time of
an employee handling one chat at a time and divides
that by 3 (since each agent is handling up to a max of 3
sessions) then uses standard single skill voice channel
Erlang-based methods to arrive
The industry has had years to think about how to plan
the voice workforce. Not so for other customer
communication channels. When you start to peel back
the onion, you will find a whole new set of metrics that
we need to incorporate in our forecasting models such
as chat concurrency (how many simultaneous chats is
the agent handling), agent composition time, customer
composition time, agent wait time, customer wait time,
and number of messages exchanged in a session, to
name a few. For WFM professionals, it is a radically
different way of having to think about customer
engagement.
Probably few readers would disagree with me when I
assert that the use of non-voice channels will become
increasingly important. If the trends of the past few
years continue into the future, we will see growth in
voice channel volumes, but voice will become a smaller
percentage of the total mix of customer interactions.
Without new channel modeling techniques, workforce
planning for non-voice interactions will become
increasingly inaccurate. In the next year or two, expect
to see other workforce management vendors featuring
improved forecasting models with non-voice channel
capability.
Eric Hagaman is product manager for Aspect Software,
focusing on Aspect Workforce Optimization
technologies with a particular emphasis on workforce 
management. Eric monitors the pulse of the market to
identify new trends and approaches to workforce
optimization, looking for those product enhancements
that will provide the most value to customers and help
them master the next generation customer contact.
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05/05/2020 Staffing Your Workforce in an Omni-Channel World – Society of Workforce Planning Professionals
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