Exploring Workforce Optimization for Customer Service
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Workforce Optimization for Customer Service
Workforce Optimization for Customer Service enables ServiceNow customers to efficiently manage and optimize their customer service teams. It supports real-time monitoring, scheduling, coaching, and forecasting to enhance agent performance and improve customer case resolution. The solution consolidates management tasks into a unified workspace, offering visibility into team workload, performance metrics, and skill levels.
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Note that from the Tokyo release onward, Legacy Workforce Optimization is being deprecated, no longer activated on new instances but still supported.
Key Features
- Manager Workspace: Provides a real-time overview of workloads and team performance using advanced scorecards, charts, and KPIs such as cases resolved on first contact, escalated cases, and open case backlog.
- Channel Management: Allows managers to monitor agents’ real-time activities across multiple channels, intervene in chats, allocate work items manually, and track queue statuses and agent presence.
- Scheduling: Enables viewing and managing team schedules, assigning shifts, defining breaks, approving time-off and shift swaps, and creating on-call rotations for escalation handling.
- Schedule Adherence: Tracks agents’ compliance with planned schedules, offers configurable adherence metrics, and provides historical attendance insights to enhance team performance.
- Demand Forecasting: Uses historical data to predict team workload and resource needs at 15, 30, and 60-minute intervals, supporting schedule adjustments without affecting service objectives.
- Teams Management: Centralizes visibility of teams and KPIs, enabling performance trend analysis, agent skill tracking, and coaching recommendations from one interface.
- Coaching and Skills Assessment: Automates skill assessments, identifies coaching opportunities, tracks training progress, and integrates with third-party learning management systems to close skill gaps.
Key Outcomes
- Improved team productivity and case resolution speed by monitoring and supporting agents in real time.
- Enhanced workforce coverage and schedule efficiency through integrated scheduling and adherence tracking.
- Better resource allocation and workload management via demand forecasting.
- Increased agent skill levels and customer satisfaction through targeted coaching and skills development.
- Unified management experience providing actionable insights and control over customer service operations.
Use Workforce Optimization for Customer Service to optimize your workforce and manage your teams efficiently.
Manage and monitor the real-time work being done by your agents across different channels and queues. Provide timely help to your team members to solve cases faster and help with complex customer issues. Coach your teams so that they gain the skills that let you address the demands from your customers. Efficiently schedule your teams to provide better coverage with integrated channel management.
The
image below displays the manager work flow between the different modules in Workforce Optimization for Customer Service
As a manager, you can monitor the demand for agents and skills in your organization to resolve issues. Assess agent skills, identify areas where they need improvement and provide training to enhance their skills set. Track your teams performance, and manage the schedule of all agents in your assignment group—all from a unified location.
As an agent, you can manage your own schedule, access the schedule of your peers and request time off or shift swaps.
Manager workspace landing page
- KPIs: Number of cases resolved on first contact, Number of cases not updated last 30 days, Number of resolved cases re-opened, Number of escalated open cases
- Work Items: Total open cases, Waiting work items, and Help requested
- Agents: Total agents, Time-off requests, Shift swap requests
- Open Cases: Open case by backlog (graph of open and unassigned cases), Open case by age (graph of 10-15 days, 15-30 days, more than 30 days)
- Critical open cases: You can see the list of open critical cases that are refreshed every 60 seconds.
Channel management
Monitor your teams in real time and jump in their chat conversations to help when there’s a need.
Using Channels, you can also:- Review the real-time performance of your teams across various channels and queues.
- Review pending work items and manually allocate some of the work items to available agents.
- Monitor actual work being performed by your team members.
- Monitor the status of the queues.
- Track and change real-time presence and capacity utilization of your team members.
Scheduling
Access your teams' calendar to see which agents are scheduled for coverage and which agents have taken time off.
Using Scheduling, you can also:
- Assign agents to shifts.
- Define break time.
- Preview and publish team schedule.
- Approve agent time-off or shift-swap requests.
- Create on-call shifts and assign primary, secondary rotation groups to handle escalation scenarios.
Schedule Adherence
Access your teams' calendar to see which agents adhered to their planned schedules and make timely decisions to increase your team's performance by setting expected adherence targets.
Using Schedule Adherence, you can also:
- Configure and tweak the schedule adherence and conformance formulas and properties so that you can customize them for your organization.
- Access the schedule of all of your teams from one location and gain insights on whether your team is complying with published schedules.
- Analyze the historical time attendance of your team members.
- View planned versus actual historical data for your team and individual agents.
Demand Forecasting
Forecast the demand for teams and predict resources based on historical data.
Using Demand Forecasting, you can also:
- View the agent staffing forecast at 15, 30, and 60-minute intervals on the team calendar.
- Adjust and prioritize schedules, tasks, breaks, and meetings for the agents without impacting service objectives.
- Use historical data and forecast the contact volumes (cases and interactions) at 15-minute intervals.
Teams
Monitor performance trends for your teams using Key Performance Indicator (KPI) groups. Create a set of KPIs and apply them to all groups within a team and assess team performance from one location.
Using Teams, you can also:
- Identify all the teams you manage as well as the ones you have visibility into.
- Analyze the KPIs that are crucial for your team.
- Drill into agents within each team and monitor their performance.
- Access each agent's profile to view details such as their manager, peers, and assignment groups.
- Drill down into each agent's skills or suggest them for coaching.
Coaching and Skills Assessment
Enhance the quality of work done by your agents using Coaching. Assess agent skills and recommend the ones that they require to resolve issues. Identify coaching opportunities based on the recommendation and train the agents to acquire those skills.
Using Coaching, you can also:
- Automate the scoring, grading, and assessment of agent skills.
- Use coaching opportunities to create assessments.
- Track training assigned to agents based on their assessments.
- Analyze the skill gap and recommend training.
- Assign courses to agents from third-party learning management systems (LMS), such as Udemy, Pluralsight, and Cornerstone OnDemand.