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Time Off Management isn't Just for Agents

It’s 6:45 a.m. on a bright and sunny Friday during the summer and she logs into her Workforce Management (WFM) system to see what’s going on at the start of the day.  It’s a normal Friday, it appears – agents are logged in and handling contacts.  As she logs into the operations group chat she notices a few messages asking for a supervisor to help with a question.  There's no response - from anyone!  Where are my supervisors?  Looking at the status for all of the scheduled managers she sees mostly yellow, red and blank status dots and starts to panic… Are there really no supervisors around on our opening shift?

Clicking on the Supervisors’ Time Off Calendar on SharePoint, she gets the dreaded “You don’t have access to this calendar” message.  So, she grabs her phone list and starts dialing their extensions…

  • Oh, Bill is on his honeymoon, so she crosses him off the list.
  • What about Jody?  Then she remembers that she is running the center tomorrow, so she has today off as a comp-day.
  • Finally, she tries Jen.  She was supposed to be here today but since she doesn’t have access to the manager calendar, she can’t see that she took today off for a long weekend.

Panic sets in.  Suddenly she realizes that she has no managers until the mid-day crew comes in at 9 am.

Sound familiar?

The names have been changed but that doesn’t matter. This scenario plays out more often than you’d think and, in some scenarios, there could be serious consequences as a result.  A complaint could be forwarded to senior management or worse yet, to a governmental or regulatory agency when a first level supervisor could have handled the call right away and the customer issue resolved.

Workforce Management (WFM) is widely used across most contact centers, but often the Group Elite team sees that centers don’t schedule, staff and monitor supervisor queues.  If you’re using Verint as your WFM solution, give us a call today to discuss how setting up manager time off pools can benefit your organization and help your business move to a higher level of efficiency and achieve your business goals.

No more SharePoint folders.

No more dialing for supervisors.

Leverage WFM to its fullest and always have a supervisor ready.

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Chris Rand

Chris Rand

Chris has nearly 20 years of experience with Workforce Management in various industries including satellite TV, business to business and financial services.  He has helped build WFM teams from the ground up and most recently acted as the WFM Business Subject Matter Expert for a large retirement services company.  As the Business SME, Chris was responsible for not only assisting with the day to day operations of the WFM application (including troubleshooting and back end integration) but also as the key knowledge management source for all WFM processes and procedures in the company.  In addition to that role, he acted as the WFM team supervisor and team lead for the growing WFM team during times of staffing changes and transition from one leadership organization to another.  Upon joining GEC, Chris shares his knowledge of the Verint WFM platform with customers in WFM Training and Consulting sessions.