Don’t Gamble on CX: Automate WFM for Predictable Success

Organizations can’t afford to gamble on customer experience (CX). Seventy-eight percent of consumers will abandon a brand after just one terrible experience.1

A key to great customer service is having the right people, with the right skills, at the right time, to quickly and effectively assist customers.

Workforce Management (WFM) is a solution that:

• Forecasts demand, so you can predict when customers will be reaching out, on which channels, and for what.
• Plans for the resources needed – number of people and skills – to meet that customer demand.
• Schedules resources to align with the arrival of customer inquiries.
• Adjusts for intraday fluctuations in demand and resource availability.
• Delivers insights to drive real-time staffing decisions and improve operational processes

Instead of relying on spreadsheets, homegrown solutions or just plain luck, modern WFM technology greatly reduces the risk of:

• High attrition
• Missed service goals
• High costs
• Poor CX.

Let Verint® Enterprise Workforce Management™ be the ace up your sleeve to elevate CX while reducing costs.

Accurate Contact Center Demand Forecasting

Predicting future customer demand can feel like trying to predict the over/under of the World Series.  Many factors need to be taken into account to create an accurate forecast.

Often, workforce planners use their historical forecasts to model a future time period and scale up or down based on their previous experience or best guesstimate. However, this approach is flawed and can lead to over or understaffing.

Accurate contact center demand forecasts need to factor in:

• Historical volumes
• Work types that reflect all their channels (voice, chat, email, social, web inquiries, etc.), both real time and asynchronous work
• The handle times of these different work types
• The time period being forecasted – time of year, day of month/week, time of day.
• Current trends and outliers that can impact the forecast, such as power outages, or handle-time fluctuations, or changes to IVR prompts
• Upcoming events that may not be included in current trends – marketing campaigns, product launches, etc.
• Daily shrinkage rates (the percentage of time agents are scheduled but are not available to handle interactions. See the blog, Is Shrinkage Causing Your Contact Center Forecasts To Be Off?, to learn more about shrinkage.)

Strategic, Long-term Planning

Borrowing a line from the Kenny Rogers song, The Gambler:

You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em. Know when to fold ‘em. Know when to redeploy. Know when to hire new.

Okay, I modified it just a bit. 😉 But this is what long-term planning is all about.

Your contact center needs to create accurate full-time employee (FTE) budgets to minimize resource costs. These long-term forecasts and capacity plans help ensure you have the right number of resources with the right skills to meet your service goals.

Verint Workforce Management includes Strategic Planner, which helps you create long-term staffing plans and enables you to run what-if scenarios against your capacity plans.

You can test the financial impact of market or staffing strategy changes on your plans and adjust as needed.

Flexible Employee Scheduling

Forecasting tells you the anticipated workload. Capacity planning tells you how many people you need. Scheduling tells you when you need those resources to serve customers. Automated scheduling software optimizes schedules to meet customer demand and employee scheduling preferences.

Yet in today’s gig economy, employees have higher expectations for scheduling flexibility.

While most workforce management solutions enable some flexibility with options for shift swaps, shift bidding, voluntary time off, and overtime—employees want more.

Verint TimeFlex Bot™ puts schedule changes into the hands of the employee.

The bot enables them to reshuffle the cards to create a schedule that gives them the work/life balance they want.

The bot monitors the changes in real time and visually shows the employee when the business is over or understaffed. They can adjust their schedules to help the company and meet their needs. The bot automatically approves the changes without manager intervention while maintaining or improving overall schedule quality.

Verint TimeFlex Bot gives employees all the flexibility they need and gives managers the confidence that schedules will adhere to their business rules and labor laws while meeting their service goals.

Watch how the Verint TimeFlex Bot works.

Intraday Management

Lady luck can be fickle. And just as employee scheduling needs change, so can work volumes, types and resource availability. Perhaps the flu goes through your contact center, and you have 5 unexpected call outs. Or marketing launches a last-minute promotion that increases inquiries.

Modern WFM technology continuously analyzes intraday performance and recalculates demand and resource availability. Managers can use this data and insights to proactively address variations to plan.

• If interactions are below projected, managers can offer voluntary time off to employees.
• If volumes are high, they can offer overtime, extra shifts, or turn on the call-back feature to reduce wait times and call abandonment.

Real-time Data Insights

And speaking of data insights, wouldn’t it be great in a poker game if you could know the cards the other players were holding, and the order of the cards in the deck?

Verint Data Insights Bot is not cheating, but the bot does uncover anomalies and trends in your workforce management data that you didn’t even know to ask about.

Real-time data insights into WFM dramatically reduces the time and effort to detect and correct behaviors before they become an issue. Reports and analyses that used to take weeks can automatically be generated in customizable and sharable dashboards.

Creating a Winning Hand for Your Contact Center

Fortune favors the bold. By deploying modern WFM technology and leveraging AI-powered, specialized bots, contact centers can drive business outcomes, now! Customers of Verint Enterprise Workforce Management have benefited from:

• 24% reduction in attrition
• 41 pt increases in NPS
• 35% increases in manager capacity
• 30% improvements in meeting service goals.

Maximize resource utilization and ensure service levels are met. Let us show you how. Contact us to schedule a demo.

1 The State of Digital Customer Experience Report, Verint, 2025

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