Workforce optimization in the financial services environment

Workforce optimization is a relatively new phenomenon in the contact center industry having only been recognized as a true solutions suite since 2003. Prior to 2003, most of the separate technology solutions that comprise a workforce optimization suite were generally available, but as point solutions only. In the contact center, the generally accepted definition of a workforce optimization solution is a suite that includes the following software solutions:

• Workforce Management scheduling software
• Quality Monitoring recording software
• Performance Management or analytics software
• eLearning content and delivery

Each of the above technology solutions will be discussed individually in the context of the financial services industry environment. It may be helpful in building an argument for the deployment of workforce optimization in the financial services industry if we look at some of the similarities in the customer service contact center and the financial services or retail banking industry. There is no question that both the contact center and the retail bank are exceptionally customer-oriented and their success is customer driven. Both markets are motivated to provide a high level of customer service in order to keep the customer satisfied and create the foundation for a long-term relationship.

Both retail banking and contact center customer service are highly disciplined professions in that employee time is fairly rigidly scheduled and tasks are well defined. Although there is some fluidity in the duties of both contact center agents and retail bank tellers, for example, the duties are for the most part fairly repetitive, lending themselves well to the measurement and analysis of performance.

Both markets rely upon the continual availability of a variety of training methods in order to keep their front-line employees, such as tellers in retail banking and customer service representatives in the contact center, trained in the latest customer service techniques. Training must be designed so that it can be administered in the most efficient means possible in order to minimize its impact on customer service levels.

In both retail banking and the contact center industry, workforce management scheduling and forecasting has been in use for a decade or more for front-line personnel. In the contact center, scheduling customer service representatives, or agents, is based upon historical data captured by the center’s automatic call distributor (ACD). The ACD routes calls to agents based upon availability or other factors such as particular skills or knowledge that an individual agent may have. The ACD has the ability to track the volume of calls at any given time as well as gather information such as how long a call has been waiting in queue before it is answered by an agent. Schedules are then created to forecast, based upon historical data, when the heaviest and lightest call volumes will occur and customer service representatives are scheduled accordingly.

In the retail bank, tellers are also scheduled based upon expected customer traffic. Traffic data is tracked at the teller station in terms of transaction volume and similar to the contact center, a forecast of expected customer traffic is based upon historical data. Many banks commission time studies to help determine how long customers must wait in line at any given time. This data also plays a part in scheduling tellers.

Both the contact center and the retail bank schedule their respective workforces based upon the objective of meeting a certain level of service. For example, in the contact center the objective may be to answer 90 percent of calls in less than five minutes. In the bank the objective may be to serve 90 percent of customers in five minutes or less. Of course, these service level objectives will vary from operation to operation, but the similarities in scheduling strategies and tactics between the contact center and the retail bank is significant.

The remaining technology solutions that comprise a workforce optimization suite have not yet found their way into the retail banking environment, but the benefits they can bring to the financial services industry could easily equal or exceed those benefits they have brought to the contact center.

Quality monitoring, which is the recording of the telephone transactions between contact center agents and customers, is a well-established practice in contact centers today. In a typical quality monitoring implementation the system is programmed to randomly record a percentage of each agent’s calls for later review. Quality monitoring supervisors review the calls and assign the agent a score based upon performance. Recorded calls that contain exemplary performance are often shared with all agents in the contact center for training and recognition purposes.

Calls that contain sub-standard performance are equally valuable in that quality monitoring supervisors use the calls as a basis for assigning corrective coaching and training, often delivered in the form of an e-learning assignment. The tight integration between the components of the workforce optimization suite allow those components to work together in such a way that the quality monitoring supervisor or coach can assign an e-learning task to a particular agent and the workforce management system will automatically schedule a learning break for that agent when call volume is low enough to allow the agent to be away from the phone without risking customer service levels.

In the retail banking environment there is no voice recording of transactions between tellers and customers yet, but there are alternatives available. Darryl Demos, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Solutions Group at Verint Witness Actionable Solutions in Roswell, GA, believes that face-to-face recording of customer transactions will be standard in the future but for the time being his company endorses the recording and monitoring of activity at the teller’s desktop.

“Monitoring at the teller desktop allows managers to track variances in performance, such as the time it takes to process a transaction,” said Verint’s Demos. “Recording and reviewing these transactions at the branch level provides people at the regional and headquarters level insight into the customer experience and branch performance as well as helping identify at the local level where training opportunities may exist.” Demos also pointed out that while many banks have e-learning portals that provide lessons and content, they are typically not integrated with other technologies such as those in a workforce optimization suite are.

Performance management and analytics are still in a relatively nascent stage in the contact center industry but are catching on quickly. In a nutshell, performance management provides desktop dashboards that communicate performance metrics to the user. These metrics are level-appropriate meaning that agents see only data that is relevant to their performance while executives may see data that is relevant to overall corporate performance. The benefit of performance management to the user is that areas of exemplary performance or below-standard performance can be quickly identified and recognized or rectified before service or operational performance standards are impacted.

Performance management has not yet impacted the financial services industry in any meaningful way, but there is no reason that it could not be applied to customer service in retail banking in the same way it is applied to customer service in the contact center. It may simply be a matter of time.

“The adoption of workforce scheduling and forecasting in the banking industry has accelerated over the last four years because the infrastructure to support it is now in place” said Darryl Demos of Verint Witness Actionable Solutions. “In addition, any community bank with more than 25 locations will have hundreds of people in distributed workforces. They have reached the critical mass necessary to justify the purchase of workforce management and now workforce optimization technologies.”

With leading edge, proven technologies available, infrastructure in place and critical mass met the financial services industry has perhaps found itself in the middle of the perfect workforce optimization storm. For the financial services industry, an industry with a heritage of being highly cognizant of customer service, the opportunity to take advantage of the proven performance-enhancing benefits of workforce optimization should be a matter of serious consideration.