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In this series we will discuss Contact Center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. Join us as we learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
Dave Hoekstra: Welcome to Working
Smarter, presented by Calabrio where
we discuss contact center industry
trends and best practices, as well
as sharing success stories and pain
points with some of the most innovative
professionals in the industry.
We're glad you're joining us to
learn and grow together in order to
provide world-class customer service
to each and every one of our clients.
My name is Dave Hoekstra product
evangelist for Col Calabrio.
And I have several guests joining
us today because we are talking
about workforce management.
And of course when you talk about
workforce management, the last
thing you want to do is have one
person, you want to have three.
So I've got three of my my close
associates here that are part of
the Col Calabrio team, and I'm
very, very happy that they are here.
One of the questions we get asked quite
frequently usually has to do with around
staffing a workforce management team.
Things like, who should I hire?
What kind of competencies
should I look for?
What's the ratio of
people to agents, right?
Those things are, they're tough
to answer, especially when
you're first getting started.
So we decided we wanted to spend a little
bit of time talking about those today.
Now I'm gonna get to all
three of my guests, but I want
to introduce the first one.
He comes to us from many, many
years in workforce management.
Florian Garnet.
He's our product marketing manager
for W F M here at Calabrio.
But he's also had extensive
time in the space here.
So, Florian, first of all,
how are you doing today?
And second of all, tell us, tell us
why we should care about what you
Florian Garnier: say.
Doing great, Dave.
Thanks for having me on the podcast today.
Yeah.
I don't know that you should care
about what I have to say, but I do
have some experience in workforce
management, so hopefully that helps.
I've been in the contact center
industry since about 2011.
I started out as an agent.
Taking calls for a company
that needed somebody to speak
French, and I could do that.
So did that for a bit and quickly fell
in love because I had some love with
Excel already with workforce management.
And over the last few years, really
from 2012 through 2020, I ran workforce
management teams of various sizes.
The larger one for one of the ride
sharing companies here in the US
where we had about 6,000 agents.
And we were forecasting, scheduling
those agents throughout the globe
really with you know, BPOs in the
Philippines and in South America mainly.
So, yeah.
I've been in love and
I'm a proud W F M nerd.
Dave Hoekstra: That's great.
And so, you know, I know
with your experience.
Your, the company was growing
pretty fast, to say the least which
means you had to expand your agent
population pretty quickly, which
also mean conversely, you had to
grow your workforce management team.
You know, like I said earlier,
one of the questions we get a lot
is kind of what kind of ratio.
Do we see, and I know there's no real
definitive objective answer, but when
we talk about W F M staff versus agents,
what's a, what's a good place to start?
Florian Garnier: Yeah.
You would really please, our friends
at the s WPP who said that there's
no such thing as industry standards.
They love to say that
and they're not wrong.
But when it comes to staffing up
a WFM team, there are boundaries
that you'd like to respect a bit.
When it comes to schedulers, that's
where you see the most commonly ratios.
Being applied roughly, I would say
one scheduler for every a hundred
agents seems to be a, a good mark.
You see that when you need to
schedule for 200, 300 folks,
it becomes really cumbersome.
When it comes to forecasting,
it's a little different.
It's not so much about the number of
agents you're managing, but the number of
skills that you have to forecast for it.
Time consuming to forecast
for a single skill.
If you have 20 skills, you, you need to
devote quite a few of of your hours in
a given day or week to, to those skills.
So you know, looking at ratios more
towards the number of skills that
you have to, to forecast for there.
And then then you have the third.
Piece of the triad of workforce
management, which is realtime management.
And there, what I like to
think about is the hours of
operations that you're supporting.
So for rta the number of eyeballs you're
gonna need on the screen and how long
you're gonna need those eyeballs to stick
around for, you know, throughout the week.
So running a 24 7 hour operation might be
very different than a five days a week,
eight to five kind of kind of operation
Dave Hoekstra: now.
If doing the math, so you had 60
schedulers working for the team there.
Florian Garnier: I did not we were running
Slim is what I would I would call it.
But what we did is rely on some of
the BPOs and the W F M staff that they
had at each site to step up on the
RTA piece, but also on the scheduler.
So we were relying on other teams that
we managed with a trim down version you
know, at our headquarters in Nashville.
Dave Hoekstra: Okay, so that was a bit
of a gotcha question and I admittedly
tried to, tried to stump you on that
one because the, clearly there are
economies of scale at play here, right?
Once you get to a certain number,
you don't need the exact one to
100 ratio that, that kind of comes
through it, you know, you start to
see the, the ability to do that and.
That's, that's an important thing
and that's why it's so hard to answer
this question is, you know, yes.
When you're first starting out,
you know, you get above a hundred
agents and one single person is
scheduling all of those people.
That's, that's a lot.
Especially you have to do schedule
exceptions and re realtime analysts and
all of those things, but we, we definitely
see some economies of scale there, so.
Great.
Thank you for that.
It's wonderful to have you on.
Appreciate it.
The next voice you're about to
hear, Is my buddy Kevin Wilk.
Kevin has been doing this for
quite some time and spent a lot of
time doing a lot of the workforce
management, but don't hear it from me.
Kevin, tell us a little bit about why
you're better than Florian and why
we should understand what's going on.
I don't know
Kevin Wilk: about that, Dave, but thanks
for the introduction and confidence.
So yeah.
I pretty much started in workforce
management when I was a teenager.
My first, well, not in workforce
management and customer service.
Sorry working my way up my first
job in high school was doing
technical support for a small
town internet service provider.
Literally picking up the phone,
dealing with customers and
troubleshooting their issues.
I kind of worked my way out of that
and into more of the technical side
of things but stayed close to customer
service the entire time and eventually
Found my way into workforce management.
It was kind of it wasn't anything
I really intended at the time.
It was never like the career
path that I said, Hmm, I'm
gonna be a workforce manager.
But I
Dave Hoekstra: think there is a 100%
ratio of people who never intended to
be W f M of people that are in W F M.
Yeah.
But I got
Kevin Wilk: in and I found that I really
enjoyed the work and the skills and next
thing I knew I had been working in there
for seven in that field for seven years.
And so that's kind of me in a nutshell.
Dave Hoekstra: And now you're
helping you're helping others
learn how to use the platform Yeah.
And spending time with
that here at Calabrio.
So it's really great to have you be a
part of this and we value your experience.
And so the question I kind of want
you to address a little bit, this
is another question we get, is.
I don't think people write down, you know,
when you're in first grade and they say,
what do you wanna be when you grow up?
Nobody writes down, I want
to be a W F M analyst.
Right.
But at a certain point, people
who get into contact center
space, they do see that.
They kind of maybe want
to trend towards that.
And so if you were to, if someone
were to ask you, how could I kind
of get into workforce management,
maybe, how would you do that and what
kind of skills might you focus on?
Yeah.
I
Kevin Wilk: think probably
the most important skills in
workforce management are the
communication and the people skills.
W F M is about relationships.
It's about your relationship with
operations, with your HR teams
with all of the other departments
that make up the organization
and make the business function.
So first and foremost for
me is communication skills.
I think second is a good.
Analytical background, being able to think
through problems and propose you know,
and, and really work out the solution and
be able, probably third in that would be,
Dave Hoekstra: Just working
Kevin Wilk: on your Excel skills
to be able to work with data and be
able to present it in a way that is
understood by your audience so that
you're able to get your point across.
Because a lot of what you do in
W F M revolves around numbers and
those can be difficult sometimes to,
Dave Hoekstra: to communicate.
Yeah.
So f one of the things I notice about US
workforce management nerds is there seems
to be really strong love for spreadsheets.
And I'm being nice because some of us
don't like Excel as much as the other
Kevin Wilk: one.
But can you express that in a pivot table,
that idea, because that's what I need
Dave Hoekstra: in my life.
And see, you stole my thunder,
Kevin, because then you really
get to know the W f N nerds when
you talk about pivot tables.
If pivot tables make you excited, you
just might be a W F M nerd, right?
Because it's a very common thread
in what, what we do, right?
And I, you hear the story over and over
again when you ask people how they get
into this business, they said, well,
I was working at the contact center
and I was pretty good with Excel and
one thing, you know, led to another
and I was in workforce management.
It seems to be very common.
It's, it's the way I got into it.
I know that the, it's the way you guys
kind of all fell into it and You know,
that's the really interesting part is when
people want to get into this space, you do
have to have that analytical background.
And then usually what they do is
they find out that they kind of
like the people part of it too.
And that's what happened to me.
I was, I wasn't into math.
I didn't, I didn't, I
hated math in high school.
I was, I chose my college major
specifically because there was no math.
That's, that, that's what's going on.
And so there seems to be there.
You know, we talk a lot about
workforce management being
like part art, part science.
Some people really like the science part
and some people really like the art part.
I was definitely one of those people.
Yeah.
Florian Garnier: And I think
it's Also the curiosity, right?
That comes, it's not just loving Excel or
being able to love pivot tables, but it's
also staying curious about the business,
understanding why the goals, why the
results, and through, you know, through
your curiosity, just keep on digging and.
Loving it.
That's, that's how, that's how I
fell into it, is because I wanted
to understand why service level
wasn't achieved on a given day and
how staffing played a part in that.
Dave Hoekstra: And such a key word.
Curiosity.
Gosh, that word just keeps coming up
over and over again when we talk about
the kind of people that we wanna look.
And so that's a great segue, Florian
into meeting our third guest here.
And he's been so good and so quiet.
Joe Presutti, love, love
that you're here, Joe.
Joe's been doing this for a long time.
He is led lots of W F M teams.
But again, don't hear it from me.
Hear it from Joe.
Joe, tell us a little bit
about, about your background.
All right,
Joe Prescutti: thanks Dave.
So I came into the space because
I, I, I was in a insurance company.
I, they were starting a W F M team.
I didn't know what it was.
They were like, Hey, you
should apply for this.
So I did and I got an interview.
They were asking questions
about numbers and data.
They really didn't talk
about workforce management.
It was basically just, you
know, numbers and data.
They hired me and I had to
build a team, so I was, it
was me as like the forecaster.
And then I was able to hire two
real-time analysts and then we grew
and we had, you know, we added on
two more realtime analysts and two
more forecasting and schedulers.
So it was.
Something where it started from
the ground and we were able to
build it from the ground up.
And I think a lot of what we're you
guys are talking about with analytical
thinking and communication skills,
that, that all, you know, goes into it.
And whenever you are building something
like that from the ground up, you,
you're, you're looking at people inside
the organization who would be good
for this role inside the organization.
Cuz you don't really, at
that point, it was 2004.
There weren't really a lot of people
out there externally who had the,
the knowledge and skill related
to workforce management that you
would bring in from the outside.
So I was looking inside
for that kind of talent.
Dave Hoekstra: Yeah.
And you know, we, we all know someone
who is very analytical, but might
not be the best choice, right.
For this particular role.
Now when the team gets larger, You have
a, it's a little easier to kind of hide
the analytical person behind the, in the
dark room, behind the curtain, right?
And please never talk to anyone.
But when you're a smaller team, You,
those analytical, analytical people can
often have to be responsible for going
out and dealing with the, the, the masses.
And, and yes, I know times have
changed a little bit since we
all kind of got into this group.
Everything we used to do is
very face-to-face, right?
You always had the opportunity
to walk up to someone's desk.
And nowadays with remote work and
hybrid working lots of different
choices out there that, that spin that.
So this question is kind of for
you, Joe, and for you Florian.
I know that.
A lot of times we get inquiries or
I see them online and nobody asks me
directly, but I see these on, on some of
the message boards and things like that.
Like, Hey, I, I have an interview
for a W F M position coming up
and what, what should I expect?
And so Joe, let me start with you.
When you were kind of bringing in
those, those team members, what kind
of things were part of the interview?
You've already mentioned some of
the skills that you looked for, but.
How did you really flesh those out
and make sure that those people
had those actual skills that you
Joe Prescutti: needed?
Well, I think the most important part,
and I, you know, Kevin mentioned this is
the people skills, so I was, I was asking
questions about how they, how they are
in a team environment, how they deal with
conflict in a team environment, because
that's ultimately what's going to happen.
If you're a real-time analyst,
you're going to have conflict with.
The operations team, whenever you
ask where somebody is, why aren't
they on break at the right time?
Why aren't, why aren't
they going to lunch?
Why are they not ready for so long?
Those kind of things, you have to be
able to ask and be comfortable with that.
So I was bringing in people who
had very, they were friendly,
people who understood data.
Team players who could step in for
someone else on the team if they
weren't there or if they needed help.
So that, that was basically my, you know,
and also, When I, we first started again,
it 2004, we didn't have the chats in
the operational, you know, world there.
When we had calls in q I had to
have my realtime analyst stand
up and yell how many calls were
in Q and people hated that.
And even the people, even the
realtime analysts hated that.
So that was the kind of
environment we were in.
So I wanted to bring in people that
could do things like that and kind
of put themselves out there, but
also understand the data piece of it.
Dave Hoekstra: Now was this, was this
like, did they just stand up and yell?
Seven?
Joe Prescutti: They would yell, they,
well, I won't say we had it's proprietary
with the, the, the companies we worked
with, but they would yell at the
company name how many calls were in
queue and sometimes they would stand
up and yell that we had four people and
not ready on that, that in that guy.
So it was just there a lot of
yelling in the, in the call center.
Dave Hoekstra: So you guys could see
though that there's no real great
answer to this and so, Florian was,
was there anything you, you did
in particular, I know a big thing
that comes across in a lot of these
interviews is, are tests, right?
We, we, we do tests.
Did were, were you
responsible for any of those?
Florian Garnier: Yeah,
I've done a few of those.
Truly.
At first, the main thing I was looking
for is somebody who has empathy that's
gonna join a W F M team is somebody
who knows what a high occupancy day
feels like getting calls back to back.
It's a, it's a different feeling.
So I was looking for somebody who had
some experience in the contact center
as an agent, ideally so that they know
that when they're impacting somebody's
schedules, they know they're playing with.
People's, you know,
lives day in and day out.
But yes, were there occasions where
we set up tests to test the the
Excel skills or the chops overall?
Absolutely.
Where we, there's one specific
interview process that comes to
my mind where we had set up a.
Excel sheet with millions
of data points in it.
Some erroneous data points,
some real hidden gems in the, in
the middle of of the data set.
And the goal was not only for the
interviewee to figure out where the
anomalies were in the data set, but
also how they would present that
data set at a more executive level
and, and just overall build a sheet.
So the guy we ended up hiring, Now
works at Collabreo when, whenever
we did this and had built this
spreadsheet with 17 different tabs
and a different approach to to the,
to the challenges that were presented.
The explanation that he provided with it
is really what sold the, the role for him.
And yeah, years later still work with
him and, and the dude is crushing
it out there and he still likes you.
He still loves me for some
Joe Prescutti: reason.
That.
That's awesome.
You know another thing that, as you're
talking about empathy, I was thinking
about was when you bring those pe, when
you're talking to those people about
W F M, you wanna bring someone in.
If you're bringing 'em from the
inside, even as well, that can keep
a secret, that cannot, well it is not
gonna go out to the floor and talk to
their friends about what's happening.
Cuz you're gonna get information
as a workforce management person
around people's, you know, you know,
terminations, people that are quitting.
Maybe there's HR implications that
you're aware of cuz you're scheduling
time for them to be off the phones.
You don't want somebody that's
gonna come in and say, oh, my
friend is being let go on Friday.
I'm gonna go let them
know that's happening.
So you have to have some kind
of, you know, tact when it
comes to that kind of stuff too.
And that was something I asked
about in every interview.
Dave Hoekstra: Okay.
Tact.
So I mean the, what it really comes
down to is people skills, right?
Right.
The, the ability to stop for a second
and say, okay, I'm dealing with human
beings about this as well, and so, Now.
Now, Kevin, when we were talking
earlier, when we started talking about
these tests, you, you, you, you got a
little bit upset and I, I'm curious.
That's a little salty
Kevin Wilk: maybe.
Yeah, a little
Dave Hoekstra: salty.
That's a, that's a good term.
Tell me about why this
particular process of.
Of testing employees or
testing interviewees.
Got you.
A little bit hot on the collar.
Don't get me wrong.
Kevin Wilk: It's, it's really good
to understand the fundamentals and
the basics, and that's kind of what
you're getting at when you're, you're
trying to do a lot of these tests, but
Dave Hoekstra: a lot of times the.
Kevin Wilk: The things that we're
testing on are not things that are
going to be part of your normal day.
I feel like, at least in my situation, you
know, we had W F M scheduling software.
I never had to build a forecast by hand.
You know, I never had
to do things in Excel.
Ever, you know, in the position I was
in, I did things in Excel outside of
that for other reasons, and my Excel
skills were extremely valuable for that.
But the, I felt, the, the
questions tend to be those sort
of like w f m catch questions.
You, you see a lot, you know, calculating
occupancy and shrinkage and understanding,
you know, the, those basic concepts.
But in practice, they.
They maybe aren't as useful,
but still good to understand.
So it just, it felt kind of like a gotcha.
In the interview when I'm going in there
and they're like asking about occupancy
and I have to, you know, wait a minute,
I only know this terminology because of
this particular, you know, W F M thing and
like, we don't even use it as a metric.
It's not a KPI that
we're tracking right now.
Dave Hoekstra: Yeah.
And yeah.
And.
I will say, like, what I see sometimes
posted online is, are things like,
yeah, I'm, I'm gonna have them
take a forecast and then build a,
a, a staffing requirement and then
build a schedule on top of it.
And it's
Kevin Wilk: like, and then I might
even put errors in my data when
Dave Hoekstra: I do that.
Yes.
That, that's just evil.
That's evil.
Yeah.
And, and the, but what, what you see
is, is you what hopefully the goal is.
Is not to say, okay, this is a
test that if you make less than a
90, you don't make it onto this.
It's really about how do you apply the
knowledge that you've learned in the past.
Right.
How can you get Yeah, it's
about those analytics.
Sorry.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
It's the analytics.
That's exactly what, it's just
Kevin Wilk: thinking and working through
problems, you know, how are you going
to approach it and get to the solution
and can you explain and justify how you
Florian Garnier: got there?
I think that's the key point is how you
explain, you know, what you are seeing.
Because in the end, workforce
management, yes, there's some analytics
that go into it, but it's how you
handle conversations with people.
When it comes to scheduling or
when it comes to your executive
leadership team, is how you present
challenges to them that have.
Occurred and that you have identified
in your contact center your
ability to communicate with others.
Because workforce management partners
with HR and with marketing and with
finance and with the product team, you
have to be able to talk to other people.
You're, you know, oftentimes you
think about the W F M team as what
we alluded to earlier, the person in
the dark room without the windows in
the closet, just crunching numbers.
But now really it's somebody
who has empathy, who can who is
curious and can talk to others.
Dave Hoekstra: Yeah.
If I had to say like,
what's my biggest challenge?
What, like that I remember from
workforce management, right?
In all the years that I did it, it
was, it was those discussions with
the team leads about, I need so
and so to get back on the phones.
Like, I'm sorry.
I know you want, you need to
do a training with them, but we
have to get these calls answered.
It's, it's the conversations
and the discussions I had.
It was never figuring out how to
create a weighted average in Excel.
It was never about crunching a particular
forecast and making sure this part was
weighted more heavily than the other.
It was always about those conversations.
And so, Joe, go ahead.
You were gonna make a
Joe Prescutti: point.
Yeah, well, just what you were saying,
I, you know, I had a daily, every
morning we had a meeting and we had all
the, all the different managers from
every department come to that meeting.
And W F M would explain here
are priorities for the day.
So if we're going to be asking later
for people to help somewhere else, or
maybe going home because we have too much
staff on that day, it we, I had that.
The, the leader of that call
would RO have rotations.
So we would have an RTA do it one
day, a forecaster, do it one day.
I would do it one day.
But I think having those conversations
every day and people, we would
explain, here's where we are, month
of date on our service levels.
Here's where we are in our
abandoned numbers, you know, this
is our attendance for the day.
We would give all that information in that
morning meeting we met for a half hour,
and I think that when we started doing
that, A lot of those conversations were a
lot easier to have cause people understood
where it was coming from and when we
would go out to a team lead in during
the day and say, look, we're gonna cancel
your team meeting today because of this.
They, they understood why.
Kevin Wilk: Yeah, I, I think
those are really good points.
There's like a sort of this balance
between the needs of the business
and recognizing that these are
individual people ultimately, and
at some level they're individual
problems that need to be dealt with.
So definitely having those,
those skills is really
Dave Hoekstra: important.
Right.
Yeah.
The.
It's, it's the age old question that
I'm sure you guys have said hundreds
of times in your career, if not
more, is if they understand the why.
Yeah, it makes it so
much easier to digest.
And, and you know, I'll admit, at
the beginning of my career, I wasn't
very good at explaining the why.
It was like, because they're on my butt
to get these people back on the phones.
That's why, because I said so, but if,
but if we, if we do a better job, and,
and that's the thing is sometimes.
You know, contact centers can be
understaffed for many months in a row
and everybody's feeling the pressure and
it's like, seriously, I haven't had a
one-on-one with my agents in like months
and now you want to cancel this one again.
And yeah.
I, I, I'm sorry.
I understand right tho those
were the harder conversations
Joe Prescutti: and you know, there were
times where you know, we would have.
Those conversations where we wanted,
we wanted to cancel a meeting where we
wanted to pull somebody onto the phone.
Cause we had calls in queue and I always
told people we can discuss and argue
about this later, but let's, when we
ask someone to be on the phone, put 'em
on the phone, there's a reason for it.
And.
Right or wrong.
That's what I wanted them to do.
Like I I, we can discuss it later and,
and if it, if we were wrong for doing
it, then we can talk about that later.
Cuz I, you know, w f m in my, in my
world has always been responsible
for those SLAs and those ASAs.
So I wanted to them to understand that
we're never going to ask for something
because we just are trying to get at you.
But if there's a problem with it,
do it and we'll talk about it later.
Dave Hoekstra: Oh, I asked
for stuff just to get at 'em.
No, I'm just kidding.
I wouldn't do that.
Don't do that.
WFM is out there.
Listen, go ahead Kevin.
You were gonna say.
Kevin Wilk: Yeah, I, I think that like,
especially with operations, you know,
it's an N W F M, it's so easy to get
focused on the numbers portion of it too.
And I would just wanted to throw the
thought out there to encourage people to
like, focus on the behaviors that change
the numbers and not so much the numbers.
Dave Hoekstra: I,
I
Kevin Wilk: just feel like a lot of
times you're talking to, you know,
people about your call volume or your
abandon rate or other things like that,
and that doesn't translate to what they
need to do to actually affect change.
It's much better to talk about the
behaviors we need to do, you know,
we need agents to wrap up faster.
We need these other things to happen.
And
Dave Hoekstra: address those.
Yeah.
It goes back to that skill that
we talked about earlier, that
insatiable curiosity, right?
That, yeah, why is this happening and
what, and what can I do to d to, you
know, when we just start accepting
status quo, that's when, that's when
things get really, really goofy.
So
Florian Garnier: I think
you know, the, the, the.
There are three components that I
would always think about whenever
building a workforce management team.
And we've talked about one quite a bit.
It's the people, the people you
hire and the people you work with.
That's definitely one of the, the
components, but the other two.
Our processes and the technology, so
processes that you put in place and
you know, Joe, what you were talking
about, reviewing metrics on a daily
or on a weekly and monthly basis.
NBRs, qbr, all the various
reviews you could do.
The processes the, the, the goals
that are, Put in place, right?
For adherence numbers or for your
SLAs, reviewing your SLAs from time to
time, is it still good to have a very
aggressive service level of 80 20?
What, you know, is usually considered
as the, as the norm out there, but
truly doesn't impact quality much.
And then technology, of course, you
know, we are a technology company
and doing workforce management.
Work without a workforce management
platform is incredibly tricky.
Doing it all via Excel is challenging.
So of course the technology, but
also the integration of your w fm
platform with the a c d with a chat
platform or your CRM of choice.
Those three components I, I
would always think are key to a
successful workforce management team,
people, process, and technology.
Joe Prescutti: For sure.
And you know, I think that when, and I
talk to Kevin about this very, very often,
you know, as you are running this and
you are staying up on, you know, changes
and making sure that you're up on the
latest things that are going on, you also
wanna make sure that you are catering
those processes toward the, the software
that you're using and not trying to.
Change the software to meet the, the
processes that you have in your sender.
I, I work with so many customers
who just say, I, you know, we've
done this for the last 10 years.
This is how, this is how we do it.
And when you get a tool like Collabreo,
you, you want to see what the
tool can do and then maybe look at
changing processes to that continuous
education, continuous improvement
piece of the, of the wheel there.
Yeah, you can
hear
Dave Hoekstra: the pain in Joe's voice
when he says that because that's, that's
what it's like to try and implement
a solution with, with with people.
And you know what, we're all guilty of it.
You, you like something the way it is and
you know that it's really a mindset more
than it is necessarily anything else is
going in and feeling feeling confident
that we can get those pieces done.
Just to
Kevin Wilk: add to that, I feel
like the collaboration with other
departments also comes into play
on that a lot, especially if you're
talking about an HR m s integration.
And a lot of times when you're
talking about your initial project
deployment, it's a lot easier to
get the energy and motivation to.
You know, discuss and fix your processes
for the new technology, then roll out
the technology and then have to look
at revisiting your processes down
Dave Hoekstra: the road.
Yeah.
When big changes happen, that's
also time to make big decisions.
Right.
And, you know, reevaluate
your skills, reevaluate your,
your, your, things like that.
And so, absolutely.
All right, guys, the last point I
kind of want to talk about is when
we look at workforce management
and career progression, right?
So I'd love to think that there's a bunch
of W f M people out here listening to
the podcast and, and wanna learn more.
If you guys, and I'm gonna kind
of round robin this, so you
know, Joe, we'll start with you.
If you were to give someone some advice
on how to get promoted within the W
F M ranks, You know, in 30 seconds
or less, what would your answer be?
I would
Joe Prescutti: say understand the
contact center, understand the
metrics, the KPIs, the people.
Use, use your, your, your
coworkers to understand the tool.
So if I, if I want to, if I'm a real-time
analyst and I wanna be a forecaster,
I need to work with the forecasters on
my W f M team to understand what, how
those things work and why it's important.
So whenever I get in that position, I
know what I'm doing and I understand
what the numbers mean and how they
impact the overall contact center.
Right.
Dave Hoekstra: And so
Kevin, same question.
Kevin Wilk: I've always been fond of the
saying, don't come to me with problems.
Come to me with solutions.
So, find a problem within your
organization that's within your scope
and that you're able to you know,
address or come up with some solution
for it and throw yourself out there.
You know, it may not be the
perfect solution, but you know,
find a problem, try to fix it.
Dave Hoekstra: Have, have that
person go, ah, this actually, this
person might have something here.
Okay.
All right.
So Florian, you got the final word here.
Let's if you, if you were giving someone,
someone some advice on how to get promoted
within the ranks, what would you say?
Florian Garnier: If I was to go back
to my younger self wanting to become
a W F M manager I would say, WFM
managers are people leader first.
So work on your communication skills on
ensuring that you know what it feels like.
Put yourself in the shoes of a W F M admin
or an agent when you are making decisions.
But overall, be a, a coach a mentor
that has a vision for where you want
to take your WFM team, how you want
to scale it, the processes you want to
put in place, the technology you want
to put into your, in your WFM team.
And and yeah, focus on those three
things and you'll, you'll go far.
Dave Hoekstra: Wow, three, three really
great pieces of advice there from from
some people who've been, been through
this and, and have really done it.
So first of all, I wanna say thank
you guys so much for joining me.
I appreciate it.
And hopefully our listeners are
gonna get a ton of great information
out of this particular piece.
I always like to say thank you to
our listeners for spending some time
with us, and hopefully you found this
informative and we're always looking
for another great idea for what we,
what people want to hear on the podcast.
So if you have an idea,
get in touch with us.
Just go to collaborator.com,
literally find any email
address and, and shoot it to us.
It'll, it'll find its
way where it needs to go.
So we really do app.
Appreciate the time.
Kevin, Florian, Joe,
thank you guys so much.
It's a pleasure working with you guys
day in and day out and I think that
our customers are really gonna benefit
quite a bit from the conversation.
So appreciate you from the Collabreo team.
Thank you guys so much for spending
some time with us and we will see
you guys on the next episode of
working Smarter with Calabria.
Thanks everybody.