- Ace
- Dec 3, 2019
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 14, 2021
"Having a nine to five job can be plainly boring most of the time. Nonetheless, I always try to find things that can make my eight-hour night shift exciting. Things like chika with a teammate about a certain process or maybe about a new item on a shopping website. Kidding! Hahaha."
Working at night is not new to me anymore. I had a few night-shift jobs before I became part of a workforce management team. I used to be a credit card application representative of a well-known foreign bank. I also worked as a marketing consultant for the clients of a small-time digital marketing firm that targeted the international market and later on became a business development associate of another firm.
Few, if not many, somehow don't have that much understanding of the people working in call/contact centers or the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. The majority of the people working in this industry are the first contact of customers to companies, (either by a phone call, e-mail, or chat) to assist, inform, and/or solve their issues with the companies' product/s and/or service/s. And just like working in any industry, working in BPO requires certain skills and a lot of patience. But I'm not here to talk about being in the frontline of this industry, I will talk about my experiences as a call center associate in a different post. Instead, this is about my role as a member of the workforce management team.
You may be wondering what workforce management (WFM as commonly known) team is. According to callcenterhelper.com, WFM is a term that encompasses all of the processes that a contact center undertakes in order to have the right number of staff available at the right time. I can try defining it in my own words but it will be pretty much the same thing with synonyms for encompasses, processes, undertakes, right number, and staff. Kidding aside, the team that I'm working with is comprised of people in forecasting, scheduling, and command center. But as a whole, it also includes people in call routing.
The forecasters, obviously are people in forecasting, are responsible for predicting the needed staff against the volume based on trends be it long or short terms. This team is also responsible for what we call capacity planning or staffing needs planning with people from operations.
As for the command center or the intraday team as known to many, they are the people who answer calls from agents who are sick because it's payday. They are also the ones who call agents out for logging in late, having long hold/call, not following scheduled offline activities (breaks, lunch, training, meeting, coaching, etc.), aux jumping or haduken (a type of manipulation for an agent to be pushed back in the queue), and other agent activities that affect the staffing. Moreover, this team coordinates and reports all staffing issues to operations and other management teams in real-time and resolves them.
To be continued...