What Is The Formula For WFM Scheduling?

The Mathematics of WFM Scheduling: Finding the Right Formula

Understanding WFM Scheduling: The Essential Formula Explained

The effectiveness of Workforce Management (WFM) planning is an essential element of efficiency in business operations particularly in sectors such as customer service, retail and healthcare. Fundamentally, WFM scheduling is about making sure that the proper number of workers who have the appropriate abilities are in place at the right time to meet the demands. But how can organizations attain this equilibrium? The answer lies in meticulously calculated formulas that match workforce availability with operational requirements.

This article explores what is the formula for WFM scheduling. Knowing these calculations will assist you in optimizing your workforce, cut costs and improve satisfaction with your customers. Let’s look at the fundamentals and practical uses of WFM scheduling so that your company is operating at its peak.

What Is The Formula For WFM Scheduling?

What Is The Formula For WFM Scheduling? The formula used for Workforce Management (WFM) Scheduling usually involves using the Erlang C formula for calculating the amount of staff needed to meet certain services in call centers.

A simple representation:

Staff Required = (Incoming Workload ÷ Individual Capacity) + Adjustment for Shrinkage

Where:

Incoming Workload = Total calls × Average Handling Time (AHT)
Individual Capacity = Available work hours per employee
Shrinkage = Time lost due to breaks, meetings, training, etc.

This gives a baseline for staffing, adjusted for efficiency and real-world factors.

What is WFM Scheduling?

WFM Scheduling is a worker management method to determine the amount of people you will need to schedule for a particular kind of job at different times during the day. For contact center workers, it’s not so straightforward as if I have 30 employees and I have to fill these hours.

Every agent is educated on specific kinds of interactions, which is reflected in the agent’s abilities. When a contact center features several channels -in this case, almost every company has at least two communication channels the decision must be determined on which channel should be assigned to the person who has the appropriate skills.

If that’s not complex enough, then you must consider past trends in volume that tell you what time of the day and on which days of the week you’ll need more or less personnel to cover the necessary shifts across the different channels. Don’t forget to consider agent availability. A WFM scheduling system must take into account the availability of agents throughout the day to ensure that you don’t reduce satisfaction of agents and then reduce employees.

Types of scheduling in WFM


Automated Scheduling	WFM software’s capability to create customized and automated schedules for staff can help you improve the efficiency of your staffing. Through resolving issues with availability, demand and demands, WFM software gives you rapid, error-free schedules.
Task-based Scheduling	If your business is focused on tasks and you create your schedules around completing tasks, then task-based WFM scheduling can be adapted to your requirements. The job sequences are designed to ensure that a specific task is accomplished in a given time frame to meet the demands of your business. Task-based scheduling gives you more flexibility in scheduling your schedules, by allowing staffing according to your workload requirements.
Real-time Scheduling	As the day progresses you may notice that your situations change. The volume of tickets fluctuates and capability or availability of your team shifts. Real-time scheduling makes sure you have enough staff to meet inflows according to your operational requirements as they shift. By relocating team members in accordance with breaks, activities or working hours you ensure that work is completed in spite of the varying demands of each day.
Shift Swapping or Trading	The shift-swapping scheduling system allows your employees to trade shifts or swap shifts according to their preferences. Companies that need flexibility in scheduling processes can benefit from this type of scheduling.
Optimized Shift Scheduling	Making a plan of work that increases the productivity of your employees and efficiency while also reducing your costs for labor is referred to as optimizing shift scheduling. It requires establishing a methodical and systematic process that is able to meet the needs of your company and your employees.

WFM Scheduling Tips To Make The Most Of Your Agents

Vary Schedule Patterns For Staff: This is our most popular WFM scheduler tip for the worker manager. It’s not a good idea to do the same task repeatedly throughout the day. Your staff members who support customers do not differ. Based on my personal experience as a collections agent. There’s nothing fun working with calls that never stop and the same shift pattern that isn’t changing.

Customers who call your team at the end of the day should receive the same high-quality service as those who call them at the start of the day. Of course, agent skills level affects this to some extent. However, the moment breaks or meals are carefully scheduled to be split between the working day this allows employees to recharge and replenish themselves to ensure a top-quality customer service and experience.

Your agents should be scheduled to work on different channels throughout the day to break the monotony. The ability to change the channels used by front-line employees in your service centers – from chat, email, telephone and SMS, prevents the tasks from becoming monotonous and boosts satisfaction of employees. In the context of an omnichannel plan, this scheduling tool will enhance the skills of your agents and will help them manage their availability, and also your Customer Support Center’s total effectiveness will rise.

Plan Regular Meetings And Basic Tasks: A well-planned management of shifts by employees can help to set the right expectations and provide an order to your day. For instance, you could consider having one-on-one meetings with the frontline staff ahead of time to ensure that it doesn’t force agents off the phone with customers, and prevent them from running your call center.

In addition, it will not have a negative effect on the customer experience. Meetings with the team on a weekly and monthly basis must also be considered when determining employee schedules to ensure uniformity, as well as to provide employees accurate expectations for their work schedules.

Meetings are an illustration of a vital time-management and scheduling consideration. But, being able to finish other tasks completed by support center employees on their days off has tangible effects on satisfaction of employees and efficiency in scheduling.

Set up your employees with a schedule to complete their tasks, so that they are able to provide customers with the best level of service each time. Making sure that you allow a block of time at the conclusion of each shift so that employees can concentrate on the tasks that are required, without disrupting their routine throughout the day will result in more attention to the experience of customers.

Here’s a list different ways that contact center administrators can improve efficiency in managing the schedules of agents:
- Allow sufficient time for breaks
- Create physical workspaces that promote open communication (or provide ways for agents to feel virtually connected)
- Provide ongoing feedback for continuous improvement
- Encourage friendly competition among agents
- Leverage efficiency-boosting technology
Allow For Preferences and Flexibility: One of the advantages of using a scheduling software within the CX center is that it permits you to establish preferences for employees. This makes it simple to provide your most hard-working employees their first choice of shifts. This shows your employees who are valued and experienced agents that high levels of service, commitment and contributions are taken into consideration when creating schedules.

This results in more efficient agent scheduling and improved satisfaction among employees. Additionally, it creates a motivator for employees to increase their productivity, which positively impacts the productivity of your employees throughout your customer service center.

In actuality the 2021 ICMI survey found that only 32% of call centers offered scheduling as an incentive for their employees which means it is a largely neglected opportunity to provide an employee perk that is valuable without cost for your service department.

The ideal software for scheduling the contact center can help you keep track of staff preferences regarding working hours, holidays, days off, as well as preferred channels (chat or phone, email tickets, chat and so on.) to give your the top employees and valued agents the time and days they’d like to be working.

Small gestures like this help your employees to make plans in their private lives. This can go a long way in assisting customer support center employees maintain an enjoyable lifestyle and have fun with life outside of their working hours.
Allow Contact Center Staff To Self-Manage Leave and Shifts: I’ve talked about the concept of giving employees of customer service centers to manage themselves based on their own preferences. I consider it to be one of the most crucial WFM scheduling strategies to make the most out of the contact center’s workforce and enhance the satisfaction of your agents. A satisfied employee is a committed and enthusiastic agent. It’s also better for your business to have employees who are happy than to incur the costs of hiring as well as training new employees.

For administrators of contact centers offering autonomy for shift swaps and leave requests is a great way to show staff you’ve got their best interests in the forefront of your mind. It reduces time for you as well as your employees, and improves the efficiency of your support center, and also increases CX across all channels your support center employs to address customers’ questions.
Keep a Pulse on Volume and Adherence with Intraday Management Solutions: This is the place where the WFM solution can be of great value to the whole contact center. It’s not just efficient in creating an accurate schedule for your front-line workers as well, but it also assists the contact center managers and analysts to make sure all employees are on the right course to provide the best standards of service.

The most efficient method to improve the performance of your contact center is by ensuring that the center’s performance is tracked in real-time. By using the WFM solution work summary page, you can see the actual tasks each employee is completing and how many cases/ tickets/chats/messages/ calls they’re completing throughout the day. A spreadsheet isn’t able to provide this level of information in real-time.

How to Optimize Workforce Scheduling

The best way to schedule your workforce is art. There are a lot of factors to consider, but the most important is to utilize the tools to handle these factors.

Here’s how you can improve the timetable of your workforce:

Assess the demands of the business: Every industry that employs hourly workers understands that each has a different set of abilities to the table. A new crane could only be operated by up to two people at most, or one or two employees could possess the necessary skills to manage an unimaginable amount of customers in the restaurant. It is crucial to keep the skills of these employees in mind so that they can plan their tasks accordingly. Keep in mind the anticipated rush hours, forecasted busy times and have a backup set of employees that you can call upon in the event of a busy work schedule.
Assess employee availability and employee trends/patterns: The effects of workforce crunches are real however, they can be managed when you keep in mind the patterns that your employees exhibit. As an example, for instance the amount of accidents occurring during the holiday season tends to rise and your employees may likely be the ones to suffer. If certain employees take more sick days take note of that and make backups in the event that they aren’t able to complete the task. If certain employees prefer working a day shift instead of a night shift, make a plan to prevent burning out and unneeded absences.
Let the scheduling begin: After you’ve considered these two factors, start planning and come up with a plan that best suits your company. In the past, when you used automation, you were able to experiment to find the best schedule, and then let your employees know about it.
Make the schedule available to employees: Employees should be able see their schedules in order to be transparent and be able to alter or exchange them with their coworkers when needed.