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16th May 2022
Efficient staffing is essential for delivering great customer service while maintaining a productive workforce.
Workforce Management (WFM) helps contact centres achieve this by ensuring the right people are in place at the right time.
To find out more, we asked Paul Turner, WEM Innovation Lead at Genesys , Nikki Quinn, Senior Solutions Consultant at Playvox, and Alex O’Donovan, WFO Consultant at Business Systems, to explain what workforce management (WFM) is in the contact centre.
Watch the video below to hear Paul, Nikki, and Alex define WFM in the contact centre:
With thanks to the following people for contributing to this video:
Workforce Management is a system that helps organisations manage staffing levels, schedules, and performance, as Alex explains:
“On the surface WFM is a set of procedures, even in Excel, that at first glance allows you to automate and manage your contact centre schedules, and as a result automate a bunch of processes outside that.
However, at a deeper level, what it’s actually doing is managing the interface between your customers and your staff, in order to keep both sets of people at a level of satisfaction of your choosing.
One, by trying to meet your customer-facing service targets, and two by creating optimal schedules within a set of constraints that keep your workforce on-site and happy.”
At its core, WFM ensures that customer service targets are met while keeping employees engaged and satisfied.
It balances customer demand with staff availability, creating efficient schedules within set constraints.
WFM removes the manual effort and guesswork involved in forecasting customer demand and planning employee schedules.
It enables supervisors to monitor key performance metrics, assess schedule adherence, and make adjustments where necessary.
“Workforce management is a solution designed to remove manual effort and guesswork for those responsible for creating forecasts for customer demand and employee schedules.
You tend to find supervisors will use these tools to monitor performance metrics and perhaps look at those variants to schedule and forecast.
And generally what we see are organizations will have benefits, including improvements to service level, perhaps some operational efficiency and general customer satisfaction improvements, because they tend to have the right resources in the right place to meet that customer demand.” – Paul
This leads to improved service levels, better operational efficiency, and increased customer satisfaction.
Beyond automation and efficiency, WFM plays a crucial role in employee engagement, as Nikki continues:
“For me, workforce management is all about people, and that’s both the employees and the customers.
It’s a tool to remove those unnecessary, repetitive manual tasks and operational headaches, and it provides insight for change. It should enable agility and enable contact centres to plan effectively.
And then most importantly for me, from a people perspective, it should execute, engage, and empower people, regardless of channel or location to provide an exceptional employee and customer experience.”
By reducing repetitive manual tasks, it allows managers to focus on workforce development and agility.
A well-implemented WFM system not only optimises staffing but also empowers employees to perform at their best, ultimately improving both customer and employee experiences.
If you are looking for more great insights from the experts, check out these next:
Robyn Coppell has worked as Digital Content Manager for Call Center Helper since 2021. After University her first job was in a contact centre and has stayed in this space ever since.
She has experience of contact centre operational management, software systems, css and php coding. She edits a lot of the guest content that is published on Call Centre Helper.
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Read more by Robyn CoppellReviewed by: Hannah Swankie
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24th September 2025
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