WFM (workforce management) vs WFO (workforce optimisation)
It's not uncommon for people to get confused between acronyms or software category types and one common mistake in our industry is thinking WFM is the same as WFO.
Both WFM and WFO are invaluable in the contact centre and when first investigating potential systems and business partners to work with it can be easy to get confused.
- WFM = Workforce Management
- WFO = Workforce Optimisation
Workforce Management
You can argue that Workforce Management is a series of processes and procedures, but the terminology is used to describe a software application that helps a contact centre with:
- Forecasting demand
- Managing certain staff details
- Scheduling the staff at the most optimal time for everyone involved
- Supporting the key operational decisions during the day
- Understanding the contact centre’s performance
Some of these things can be done on paper and in Excel. However, it’s not long in today’s age of complex rules, varied skills, long opening hours and trying to give your employee’s a work-life balance that Excel just can’t cut it.
Workforce Optimisation
Workforce Optimisation is a broader list of key contact centre tools including Workforce Management (WFM)!
Workforce Optimisation includes:
- Workforce Management
- Call Recording
- Quality Monitoring
- Customer Feedback
- Speech Analytics
- Text Analytics
- Data Analytics
- Performance Management
Verint have released their 5th generation Workforce Optimisation suite and the solution is a truly unified one.
What does unification really do for users?
Unification provides the Verint Impact 360 WFO user with one interface to navigate and stops the requirement to jump from one product to the other, this makes the solution much easier and faster to use.
This increases the speed and likelihood of finding issues and resolving them quickly and efficiently in the contact centre environment.
If your WFO suite is built from individual vendors then at best you can hope for is a loose integration of some of the elements.
If you would like to know more about Workforce Management and Workforce Optimisation please feel free to contact [email protected].
