Every business owner knows that labour is both a company’s biggest asset and its largest cost. Maximising this valuable resource is essential to a healthy bottom line. That’s where workforce management adds value by helping optimise the productivity and efficiency of a company’s workforce.
In a traditional set-up, workforce management specialists help contact centres do things like forecast staffing needs, build rosters, track attendance, and measure their agents’ performance. But in response to changes in technology, particularly the rise in artificial intelligence, Datacom has broadened and enhanced its approach to workforce management. It’s an approach that Nicola Lutze, Datacom’s Workforce Planning Manager, says puts the organisation well ahead of the curve.
“Everyone has a workforce, so everyone can use workforce management,” she says. “Datacom has an experienced workforce management team and our central function is to provide more of an advisory role, rather than doing the work for our clients. We don’t manage people on the floor; we’re there to help provide insights and opportunities for them to improve their financial wellbeing. We help companies break down and optimise costs to increase profitability across their business.”
Employing different processes and platforms can help achieve efficiencies up front. Datacom positions itself as a provider of insights and a practitioner of workforce management platforms.
“We engage with clients to understand their business, recommending tools to automate things such as roster-building and to help with their workflow and telephony management,” says Nicola. “One of the main workforce management platforms we use is Genesys, but we work with others including Nice, Verint and Alvaria.”
With more than 15 years’ experience in workforce management, Nicola divides her time between strategic and operational work, managing Datacom’s teams of workforce planners and schedulers in Manila and Australia.
“Workforce management has always been my passion,” she says. “I love that we work with so many different customers so there’s always something new to do. It’s very rewarding to be able to help businesses and people solve their problems – and it’s not just about meeting financial goals, it’s also customer experience and employee experience goals.”
Modelling a business’s workforce requirements involves forecasting and planning. Datacom’s process is the same, irrespective of the industry or the type or size of the company.
“Whether it’s a big contact centre or a service desk, we always take the same approach, what’s called our Workforce Management Lifecycle.”
This begins with the planning phase – forecasting and dimensioning workloads, and capacity, recruitment and intake planning – and moves into the scheduling and build phases where rosters are built and staff matched to demand. The process ends with the execution or real-time phase where tweaks and adjustments are made to achieve the desired deliverables.
“We have clear roles and responsibilities within our workforce management practice at Datacom. The workforce planning managers handle the planning and scheduling phase and real-time managers handle the execution. To achieve the best outcomes we have specific handover points in terms of deliverables. This is really important because it allows the team to challenge whether we are doing our best work.”
When Datacom customers have outdated legacy processes, the workforce management team can help improve these and cut costs, transforming the company’s operations.
“One of our clients was having significant challenges with their workload and processing times post Covid,” explains Nicola. “They engaged us to help from a labour-cost perspective and to look at their business processes and customer experience. We could have just come in and done the workload for them, but we examined their total ecosystem to see how they ran things. This client didn’t have a CRM or customer reference tool to house information, so customers calling them would have to repeat themselves every time. We were able to move their processing times from six months down to four weeks.”
It’s essential that any processes add value rather than create chaos and panic within a contact centre. Equally important is the trust and confidence the Datacom team engenders among its clients.
“Not everyone thrives in the chaos that is workforce management,” Nicola notes. “I bring the calm – without that, it’s very difficult to build trust. Our clients have issues and pressures from all directions and we come in as that calm force. We’re not reactive; we look at the information and formulate options for tackling their challenges. We’re able to handle the situation with composure and resilience and find a solution, which creates trust.”
Keeping up to date with developments in the workforce management space is also vital. Nicola says new technology is leading to rapid changes.
“I believe that in the next five years the traditional workforce management roles will be 80% transformed. But rather than be scared of that, we need to ask how we can get ahead of the curve. That’s why at Datacom we’re getting accredited across all the big platforms so that we can both be a reseller and provide workforce management expertise across all these platforms.
“What I’m most excited about is the growth and where we’re heading. A lot of people are afraid of change, particularly if it might do them out of a job, but I’m really excited, and I think: watch this space for Datacom in workforce management. We’re going to market. We’re building all this cool stuff over the next year and it’s very exciting.”
