Data, Not Opinions: How WFM Leaders Earn a Seat at the Table

Contact center workforce management (WFM) professionals love data. Spreadsheets, forecasts, Erlang calculations: it’s home turf. But as Florian Garnier, Verint’s Senior Manager of Go-to-Market Strategy, reminded attendees in our recent Verint Master Class, How to Move from Reactive to Proactive, Real-Time AI WFM, data alone doesn’t move an organization.

Whether you’re rolling out a new adherence program or trying to change a metric that no longer serves your customers, you need influence. And influence comes from trust. In Florian’s words, it’s about “bringing data and not opinions to the table,” and it’s also about simply being at the table where decisions impacting the contact center are made:

• Budget and staffing discussions
• New product launches
• Upcoming marketing campaigns and special promotions
• System upgrades and new software rollouts

WFM managers earn influence by consistently bringing accurate, easy-to-read data, testing inherited metrics, and building relationships with Marketing, Product, Finance, and Quality. Here’s how Florian and Trudy Cannon, Verint’s Senior Director of Go-to-Market Strategy, recommend earning it.

Start by testing your inherited WFM assumptions

In most contact centers, at least a few metrics were set by a team that’s long gone or an executive who has since retired. They’ve stayed in place because no one has questioned them. That’s your first opportunity.

Is an 80/20 service level what your customers actually need?

Why is your contact center service level set at 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds? Does it reflect how long your customers are actually willing to wait? Look at when callers really abandon the queue: after one minute, two, three?

The answer often depends on the type of contact. Customers who know their issue will take a while to resolve may be willing to wait longer. Customers with a quick, simple question expect a fast answer. Your data can show whether a single service level goal still makes sense, or whether goals by contact type would serve customers better.

Is near-perfect adherence realistic?

Florian admits that, as a young WFM manager, he thought 100% of everything was the goal, until he realized that a 100% service level would mathematically require the entire world population to be answering his phones.

Adherence works the same way. Agents will occasionally be late for a break or lunch. So run an experiment: model what adherence looks like when agents are a few minutes late for each break and lunch. Is that an acceptable goal? You want agents doing the right thing at the right time, but if you’re offering schedule flexibility, hammering them with an unrealistic adherence target works against you.

Testing assumptions like these only pays off if leadership is willing to act on what you find. That’s where trust comes in.

Trust is earned, not given

Florian is the first to admit he once brought an executive an Excel spreadsheet with a “couple million rows,” instead of a simple graph that made the point for that specific executive. Lesson learned. Trust builds when you consistently provide good, relevant data that’s easy to read, gets to the point, and “tells a story that people will understand.”

Over time, people come to see you as someone who is reliable, knows what they’re doing, and needs to be included in every conversation about long-term planning for the contact center.

Practically, that means:

• Lead with the answer. Start with the decision or recommendation, then show the supporting data.
• Visualize it. One clear chart beats a million rows.
• Tell the story. Connect the numbers to outcomes leaders care about: cost, customer experience, and risk.
• Be consistently right. Reliability compounds. Every accurate forecast makes the next recommendation easier to approve.

Why the seat matters: volume starts outside the contact center

Many of the biggest drivers of contact center volume are decided in meetings WFM managers aren’t invited to.

Florian offered an extreme example: Marketing decides to run a Super Bowl ad in February. Volume will spike, and WFM needs to know. A subtler one came from his own experience at an app company. The product team moved the contact-help button from seven pages deep in the app to the front page. Volume jumped, and he didn’t know why until after the fact.

That’s why WFM managers need relationships across the business:

• Marketing, for campaigns, promotions, and launches that drive contacts.
• Product, for releases and design changes that affect how customers seek help.
• Finance, for budgets, headcount targets, and cost-reduction goals.
• Quality, for insight into what’s driving contacts and how first contact resolution (FCR) is trending.

Being part of those conversations lets you plan for what’s coming, and question goals that don’t fit what you know about your operation.

138 heads: A story about trust and accuracy

Trudy shared a story from her own WFM career that shows how trust is built, and why accuracy is what makes it last.

Her team was heading into a busy period with only enough outsourced staff confirmed to hit baseline service levels. Attrition was eating into capacity. Working from a rolling 18-month forecast, she told leadership in advance: when we get to this point, we won’t make service level, because we can only afford so much headcount.

They missed their service level one month, then two. Then leadership came back with a different question: “Trudy, how many heads do we need to meet service level? Because we’ll go to the outsourcer and confirm that.”

Because she had a plan, she had an answer: 138. Leadership confirmed exactly 138 outsourced agents, a first in her career. And the team met service level as a result.

Then she raised the harder question for herself: what if I hadn’t been accurate? What if I had gained the trust but couldn’t follow through because I had an accuracy concern?

With that win behind her, Trudy had the credibility to bring her next idea to the table: an analysis showing adherence might not need to be 97%. At 93%, the team could still meet its service goals.

A simple formula for earning trust

Trudy summed it up in two parts:

1. Do the due diligence. Data matters, and accuracy really matters.
2. Always be ready to answer, “How many heads do I need?” As she put it, “You never know when you might actually get the outsourcing resources.”

Answering that question at a moment’s notice is much easier with a long-term capacity plan that’s always current, rather than a spreadsheet that takes a week to update. Verint Long-Term Capacity Planner helps you make strategic, data-driven decisions on future staffing needs, like when to hire or when to reduce or redeploy headcount. You can now create more accurate budgets to minimize resource costs and ensure contact center service levels are met. Learn more about long-term capacity planning by checking out the blog: It’s Almost May: Is Your Fall Contact Center Capacity Plan in Place?