Breaking The Chains of WFM Paradigms For Dummies

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Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

Breaking the
Chains of the
WFM Paradigms
NICE Special Edition
by NICE WFM team

with Chris Ward
These materials are © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Breaking the Chains of the WFM Paradigms For Dummies®,
NICE Special Edition
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 1
About This Book.................................................................................... 1
Icons Used in This Book........................................................................ 2
Beyond the Book................................................................................... 2
CHAPTER 1: The Evolution of Digital Channels................................... 3

Understanding How the Nature of Work Is Changing...................... 4
Identifying the Complexities of Digital Channels.............................. 6
CHAPTER 2: Exploring the Role of WFM with

Digital Channels............................................................................. 9
Digging into the Importance of Digital
Channel Management........................................................................ 10
Understanding Forecasting and Staffing Calculations
for Digital Channels............................................................................. 12
CHAPTER 3: Changing WFM Paradigms with

Digital Channels........................................................................... 15
Discovering the Data Challenges of Digital Channels..................... 16
Making Customer Service More Complex with Bots....................... 17
Identifying the True Requirements with Digital Channels............. 18
CHAPTER 4: Introducing True to Interval Analytics...................... 21

Exploring TTI Analytics........................................................................ 22
Breaking the Chains of WFM Paradigms.......................................... 23
CHAPTER 5: Solving Problems with TTI Analytics........................... 25

Identifying How TTI Analytics Impacts Forecasting......................... 26
Looking at the Benefits of TTI Analytics on Staffing
Requirements...................................................................................... 28
CHAPTER 6: Considerations for TTI Analytics and Digital

Channel Management............................................................ 31
Uncovering the Impacts of TTI Analytics.......................................... 32
Introducing NICE CXone ACD............................................................. 34
Understanding the Power of CXone Contact Routing.................... 35
Table of Contents iii
CHAPTER 7: Looking to the Future of Digital Channel
Management and WFM......................................................... 37
Unwrapping the Generational Impacts on Digital Channels......... 38
Exploring the Future of AI Technology on Digital Channels........... 38
CHAPTER 8: Ten Thoughts for True to Interval

Analytics in WFM......................................................................... 41
Understand Your Customers............................................................. 41
Customer Choice is Key...................................................................... 42
Identify the Right People.................................................................... 42
Know Your Strategy............................................................................. 42
Explore Your Data............................................................................... 43
Be Realistic........................................................................................... 43
Identify the Benefits............................................................................ 43
Explore Your Solutions....................................................................... 44
Flexibility Is Good................................................................................ 44
Consolidate When Possible................................................................ 44
iv Breaking the Chains of the WFM Paradigms For Dummies, NICE Special Edition
Introduction
D
igital channels aren’t a new concept to the contact center
industry, but the evolution of these channels and the
possible options for customers have changed dramatically
in recent years. For decades, contact center workforce manage-
ment (WFM) largely focused on inbound calls, but we’ve recently
witnessed a refreshing shift toward embracing all media types,
from emails and chats to social channels and more, for forecast-
ing and scheduling. Customers have started demanding or receiv-
ing multiple ways to interact with their service providers, causing
contact centers to rethink the concept of what work is and how
it’s assigned.
The nature of work is changing, and we must adapt to these

new principles in order to plan effectively. The addition of new
generations to the workplace, the lasting effects of the pandemic
on consumer and employee behavior, and the need for resiliency
amid economic uncertainty have combined to create a perfect
storm of challenges for the contact center.
About This Book

Breaking the Chains of the WFM Paradigms For Dummies, NICE Spe-
cial Edition, explores the challenges of the current methodologies
used to forecast and calculate staffing requirements. The book
looks at the existing ways in which data is gathered and stored
for digital interactions and how these common techniques will no
longer work as the world of digital channels evolves.
You discover the limitations most WFM systems face with regards
to the information they need to create forecasts and schedules
and a new world of opportunity for gaining accurate insight into
how work is handled. This book introduces new concepts for how
work should be tracked and explores the new paradigm of digital
channels within WFM.
Introduction 1
Icons Used in This Book
In this book, we’ve included icons in the margins. These icons
mark certain key paragraphs. Here’s what those icons mean:
Tips give you actionable insights and considerations for digital

channel management for WFM.
This information gives you key things to remember about digital

channel management for WFM.
In order to make your processes run smoothly, take note of this

cautionary content to avoid pitfalls.
We want to provide you as much detail as possible without getting

lost in the weeds. But if you want to delve a little deeper into the
techie details, here is some information for you.
This icon provides details of new concepts and ideas brought

about by digital channels.
Beyond the Book

Despite all the words on these pages, there’s only so much space,
and you may want to know more. For additional insight, check out
these resources:
»» www.nice.com/resources/goodwill-san-antonio-
explains-why-cxone-is-the-best-cloud-cx-solution:
Watch a video on the NICE CX One Product.
»» www.nice.com/resources/wfm-in-a-digital-world-
rethinking-scheduling-and-kpis: Find out more about
KPIs and scheduling for digital channels.
»» www.nice.com/resources/wfm-challenges-with-
digital-channel-management: Discover more information
on the challenges digital channels create for WFM.
2 Breaking the Chains of the WFM Paradigms For Dummies, NICE Special Edition
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Looking at the changes in the nature
of work
»» Facing the challenges of digital channels
Chapter 1
The Evolution of Digital
Channels
F
or many years, workforce management (WFM) has
predominantly been used to forecast and schedule calls. The
increase in digital channel usage, which was accelerated by
the COVID-19 pandemic, now means that customers have even
more choice in the methods they use to communicate with their
providers. With many contact centers forced into home working,
digital channels were initially the only communication methods
available to customers. While some businesses may have used
WFM for forecasting and scheduling non-voice work, this was
mainly done at a very high level with fixed shift patterns and
siloed work streams.
However, in the past few years, there’s been an increase in WFM

being used for more than just voice channels. As customer demand
has changed, many businesses are now forced to rethink the use of
digital channels in conjunction with their WFM solution. Contact
centers are consolidating their scheduling for voice and digital
channels into one unified WFM system. However, most WFM
CHAPTER 1 The Evolution of Digital Channels 3
solutions aren’t designed for scheduling agents who are working
multiple channels simultaneously, such as voice and chat. This
approach can cause inefficiencies and inaccuracies when calculat-
ing staffing requirements, often resulting in costly overstaffing.
In this chapter, you see how digital channels are changing and the
impacts these changes will have on WFM.
Understanding How the Nature

of Work Is Changing
The nature of work is changing and customers now have access
to a wide range of channels; therefore, you need to make sure you
can effectively track, plan, and manage for the digital world in
which we all now reside. The pandemic and downstream impacts
accelerated a new wave for digital transformation, increasing
adoption of digital channels as well as uncovering the usage and
scalability of a wider, more tech-savvy population. As a result, use
of newer communication modes has spread across the generations
that were previously siloed to the channels they knew. Regardless
of age, employees are now familiar with using non-voice, asyn-
chronous communication methods, such as Webchat, Sharepoint,
or Microsoft Teams, as part of their day-to-day interactions
at work.
With customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter scores (NPS)

being some of the key metrics for contact centers, you need to
ensure that your customers not only can contact you and get a
timely response but also do that in a way that suits them. Not
offering a choice of channels that consumers can choose from
to interact with you means that you could be forcing them into
channels they may not be comfortable with. This can impact CSAT
and NPS, and it could also drive customer churn.
The events over the recent years have caused many companies to
reevaluate their ways of working, including how to best m
anage
employees’ workloads with the evolution of home working.
This reevaluation of priorities, coupled with new digital chan-
nels, means the customer — not the business — has power over
how and when they communicate with businesses. This shift in
customer adoption drives a new era of digital channel adoption
within the contact center industry.
If you have a wide and varied customer demographic, it’s impor-

tant to give your customers choice as well as to educate them
about using alternative channels and promote them where sup-
ported. There is very little benefit in forcing your customers to use
an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bot or self-service if the
vast majority of your customers will only speak over the phone.
Likewise, offering only voice channels may isolate a large portion
of your customers who want digital service.
Customers want and expect more choices in how they interact

with your business, and the demographic of your customers and
your employees is changing. For the first time in history, four
generations are working side by side in the workplace. These
generations are the Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen
Z. Among other differences, each generation has distinct prefer-
ences when it comes to communicating:
»» Baby Boomers: Having grown up in the age of the tele-

phone, Baby Boomers often favor this method of communi-
cation. This generation likes to be able to get directly through
to a contact center employee without a fuss or a complicated
process. Call flows containing automation and self-service
may be something that takes time for this generation to get
used to, so make sure that it’s reliable and that the menu is
easy to navigate to avoid your customers getting frustrated
and looking elsewhere for your product or service.
»» Generation X: Their first method of communication when
it comes to customer service is also likely the telephone.
However, unlike their Baby Boomer predecessors, Generation
X are more accustomed to the idea of self-service. This
generation isn’t alarmed by a bot at the other end of the
phone to help direct their call.
»» Millennials: This was the first generation to grow up with the
internet. As digital natives, they embrace technology com-
pletely. Their smartphone is an extension of their arm — and
mind. But you won’t catch this generation on a telephone
call — that’s right; Millennial phone phobia is a thing. This
generation would much rather speak with a conversational
AI virtual agent instead of, or prior to, speaking with your
customer service employees. They love to self-serve, an
option which they expect your business to provide.
»» Generation Z: This social media-loving generation is even
more dependent on their smartphones than Millennials. They
demand increasingly personalized customer experiences and
will provide more personal data to get it, and they expect this
in the way that they communicate with businesses as well.
Identifying the Complexities

of Digital Channels
One of the biggest complexities when it comes to calculating
staffing requirements and scheduling employees is the nature
in which work is handled by employees. Employees are required
to handle multiple types of work at the same time. This isn’t a
new requirement, but it’s one that has escalated because of the
demands of the COVID-19 pandemic and customer expectations.
Companies are realizing that the siloed approach to handling

multiple types of channels has serious drawbacks. Most digital
channels are asynchronous in nature, which means that it’s nor-
mal that there are considerable time windows within interactions
that take a hiatus — for example, when a consumer is looking
something up or even when they temporarily lose focus. For this
reason, some interactions take longer — hours, sometimes even
days — to achieve successful resolution. Even in such a case,
though, today’s consumers expect seamless continuation without
loss of context when they come back to an interaction. They want
to be able to seamlessly pick up where they left off. Making the
employee wait, though, isn’t effective, so companies are looking
for ways to maximize employees’ time. Employees are juggling
two or three interactions in one or more different channels at the
same time, and some of them can be synchronous, such as voice or
certain types of chat, while others are asynchronous, such as email
or most social messaging.
This multiskilled, omnichannel approach is not only complex,

but also it requires your WFM system to be able to understand
the logic of interruptible channels with deferred workloads and
elevated contacts — adding an outbound interaction to a cus-
tomer session (for example, an outbound call or email for first
contact resolution or when asked for by the customer to raise
customer satisfaction). In Figure 1-1, you see how these channels
may overlap and how employees are working several channels at
the same time.
FIGURE 1-1: An employee may be required to handle multiple channel types.
At the same time the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to

expand and adopt digital channels, it also forced them to figure
out how to work in a fully remote environment. This changed
everything people thought about managing a workforce, man-
aging contacts, and connecting with others. Instead of having a
piece of work to be completed (for example, answering a customer
call) while the employee was in the office, the employee became a
participant in a work stream with many activities underway (for
example, responding via email to a customer whose interaction
had begun with another employee via chat the day before).
Companies started rethinking how their workspaces were

designed to create an activity-based environment that was more
living and breathing and adaptable to employees’ needs — much
like an individual’s home environment is. This has resulted in a
much more flexible workspace, which goes hand in hand with
more flexible work assignments and much more flexible plan-
ning, scheduling, and forecasting. Companies are increasingly
rethinking the workspace itself and the activities they assign their
contact center employees.
The end result? The work environment today looks vastly
different from that of just a few years ago. With four generations in
the workforce, organizations are expected to meet vastly different
expectations and communication preferences of an increasingly
tech-savvy workforce and customer base. The nature of work
has changed for good, and businesses need a WFM solution that
breaks the chains of traditional WFM paradigms to stay compet-
itive. See Chapter 3 for more information on the data challenges
with WFM in a digital-first operation.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Discovering why digital channel
management is important
»» Working with forecasting and staffing

calculation
Chapter 2
Exploring the Role
of WFM with Digital
Channels
W
orkforce management (WFM) solutions have histori-
cally been used to forecast inbound call volumes and
schedule employees to handle those calls. The process
was relatively straightforward because employees handled one
interaction at a time, answered each phone call in real time, and
completed contacts in an uninterrupted flow. This sequential flow
of contacts meant that staffing for these inbound channels was
typically straightforward, too. Additionally, many months or,

frequently, years of historical call volumes and handling times
were often available. These data points enabled a mathematical
formula, such as time series autoregressive integrated moving
average (ARIMA), to generate reasonably accurate forecast
volume and interval distribution. However, forecasting and
scheduling requirements for digital channels — including chat,
email, social media, and SMS/text — are different.
Workforce solutions are accustomed to generating forecasts

and schedules for the more traditional channels, such as voice,
CHAPTER 2 Exploring the Role of WFM with Digital Channels 9
but the approach needs to be different when managing digital
channels. As most contact centers evolve, they need to
consider that digital channels include deferred activities, back-
log, and employees handling multiple interactions simultane-
ously (for example, four chats at the same time). Due to these
inherent differences, traditional forecasting methods and staffing
calculations, such as Erlang C, aren’t well suited for calculating
staffing requirements. Forecasting modules for digital channels,
and accounting for blended environments where employees move
seamlessly between call and non-call channels, require updated
WFM solutions that employ specialized mathematical algorithms,
simulation methods, modeling techniques, or a combination of all
three to generate volume projections and staffing requirements
for omnichannel contact center operations.
Predicting workloads and creating schedules for digital channels

can be challenging and requires an assortment of complex and
hard-to-identify data. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) deter-
mines the best algorithm, ensuring optimal accuracy. Forecast-
ing must consider omnichannel interactions and unique average
handle times to determine the proper full-time equivalent (FTE)
requirement by skill, channel, and time.
In this chapter, you take a deeper look at why digital channel

management is important and what happens when you get this
wrong.
Digging into the Importance of Digital

Channel Management
Digital channels have far-reaching implications, not just for how
organizations provide service today but also for how much more
change is in the near future. Those who “win” customer service
will need to reimagine it completely — and digital will be central
to that.
The customer doesn’t differentiate between traditional contact

methods and digital channels. Digital customer experience (DCX)
is inseparable from the all-encompassing customer experience
(CX) — something all too familiar with voice channels. If CX is
about showing empathy, building trust, and human connection,
DCX is the online expression of these efforts. Customers expect the
same level of service regardless of their chosen contact method.
Managing digital channels and how you respond to the customer
is vital for a successful contact center. The shift in emphasis
from traditional contact methods to digital is changing the way
we approach customer interactions. Contact center advisors will
become expert communicators, capable of delivering insight and
substantive value to the customer experience across traditional
and digital channels.
Poor management of digital channels will only lead to customers

making contact in other ways, resulting in higher overall contact
volumes and increased staffing levels. Far too often businesses
offer email channels to customers, but because these aren’t given
the same priority as calls, they usually end up with a much longer
response time, giving customers the option to make contact in
other ways when they don’t receive a timely response.
The first call resolution metric — the measure of how many times
a customer must call you to have their query resolved — must
also apply to digital channels and become first contact resolution.
This adds more complexity to this metric because you now need to
track a single customer across multiple channels to avoid unnec-
essary contact volume. If your customer doesn’t get a response
by using their social media channel, they may decide to contact
you via chat or voice (or both). Therefore, you must manage and
monitor your customer’s digital interactions and ensure that each
channel is staffed correctly.
With digital channels, your communication may be visible to a

much wider audience when compared to traditional methods.
With social media platforms providing views to millions of other
customers, ensuring a swift and accurate response may stop your
business from trending for the wrong reasons. For these reasons,
it’s imperative that businesses manage digital channels as part of
the standard customer journey. Inconsistency in this area frus-
trates users and erodes loyalty, which impacts overall customer
experience.
Businesses are at a greater risk of losing consumers than they

think when they provide digital experiences. The likelihood of
consumers abandoning a brand after several poor experiences is
similar for both digital and non-digital (phone) customer service.
However, businesses may not notice how quickly consumers will
leave after poor digital experiences.
Forty-one percent of consumers will abandon a brand after
two bad digital interactions, whereas only 25 percent of busi-
nesses believe that consumers will leave that quickly. The major-
ity of businesses (66 percent) predicted that, in most cases, it will
take three or more bad interactions to cause a consumer to churn.
While businesses may perceive that consumers are more patient

with poor digital customer service, there is a gap of 23 points.
Thirty-four percent of businesses believe that consumers will
leave after one or two poor experiences, when in reality 57 percent
of consumers say they would leave.
Businesses consider that the majority of consumers are very

satisfied with digital channels. However, in reality, just 15 percent
of consumers would say the same. When you implement digital
channels, do so with customer experience as the key factor,
instead of thinking that digital channels are just an easy way to
reduce customer contact.
Understanding Forecasting and Staffing

Calculations for Digital Channels
One of the biggest challenges businesses face when forecasting
and scheduling for digital channels is understanding that they
need to adopt a different approach from what they’ve done for so
long. Many businesses don’t realize that digital channels don’t
operate in the same way as voice, but they try to apply the same
logic to forecasting and scheduling.
Digital channels come in many shapes and sizes. The first thing
you need to understand is the difference between immediate and
deferred response channels:
»» Immediate response channels require an employee to

handle that interaction type to prevent it from abandoning.
These channels are usually associated with voice and live
chat and have a short response or answer time (normally
measured in seconds).
»» Deferred response channels are ones where you have a
delay in answering, and they won’t abandon if not handled
immediately. These channels include SMS, social media,
email, direct messages, or the use of Contact Us forms
through your company website. These interaction types
usually have response times in hours or days.
These two types of interactions also have many different attri-

butes, which define the characteristics of how that channel
behaves:
»» Simultaneous interaction types: An employee engages in

more than one interaction or channel at a time. For example,
an employee could be doing two chat sessions with two
different customers at the same time. This is also known as
concurrency.
»» Interruptible interaction types: These types may be
paused or put on hold to allow the employee to handle a
different interaction or channel. These interactions tend to
be deferred work and can be resumed at a later time.
»» Interrupt priorities: These are used to decide what work
may interrupt other work types. For example, you may
decide a chat session can interrupt an email, but a voice
call may not interrupt a chat.
»» Asynchronous interactions: These are contacts where the
conversation, dialog, or messaging between the requestor
and the employee is intermittent, sporadic, and discontinu-
ous. There are frequent pauses or breaks in the flow of the
conversation. The requestor and the employee aren’t fully
engaged and are easily distracted by other work objects.
SMS, social media, in-app chat, and forums are examples
of asynchronous interactions.
»» Synchronous interactions: These are contacts where the
conversation, dialog, or messaging between the requestor
and the employee is continual and contiguous. Although
there may be pauses or breaks in the flow of the conversa-
tion, the requestor and the employee are fully engaged and
not easily distracted by other work objects. Phone calls and
live chat are examples of synchronous interactions.
»» Long asynchronous interactions: These interactions have
long gaps or pauses between them. These interactions
can be sporadic and can span multiple days. An example
includes an email conversation that starts on one day and
can finish the next day or even further into the future.
»» Elevated interactions: These start on one channel type and
transition to another. Consider the case of an interaction
that starts as a chat before the employee elevates it to a
phone call and then ultimately to email.
When you generate forecast and staffing plans, you not only must
consider the channel type but also the attribute of that channel
because this has big impacts on your staffing requirements and
ultimately your schedules.
A simple example of this can be seen when you look at how live
chats are handled. You know that live chat can be both immediate
and simultaneous, so you must have a calculation that accounts
for the fact that one employee can handle two or more live chats
at the same time.
This calculation, referred to as concurrency, allows your WFM

solution to factor this into your staffing requirements. However,
not everyone may be able to handle the same number of con-
current chats, especially those new to this channel. This means
that concurrency not only needs to be factored into the overall
staffing calculation, but also it should consider the individual
employees’ ability to handle multiple chats. To further complicate
things, these chats may also be elevated, meaning that while the
interaction may have started as a chat, that contact was moved to
another channel such as voice or email.
The world of forecasting and staffing is becoming far more com-

plex than we’ve ever known, so you must have a WFM solution
that meets both your business and customer expectations.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Looking at data challenges of digital
channels
»» Realizing the impact of bots on customer

service
»» Identifying digital channel requirements
Chapter 3
Changing WFM
Paradigms with
Digital Channels
T
he paradigms of workforce management (WFM) and the
data that drives your WFM solution are changing. These
changes are heavily driven by the choices customers make
to interact with your business, and you need to understand how
this impacts the methods you use to calculate forecasting and
staffing requirements and how you schedule employees.
Most WFM solutions on the market today have two major short-
comings: They treat work items that span multiple planning
intervals as a single work item, and they treat asynchronous work
in the same way as synchronous work. Both shortcomings lead to
planning and scheduling inaccuracy.
In this chapter, you explore some of the challenges with the old
paradigms, and we explain how these impact forecasting and
staffing.
CHAPTER 3 Changing WFM Paradigms with Digital Channels 15
Discovering the Data Challenges
of Digital Channels
When dealing with customer interactions, you may have learned
several key traditional principles. However, these old principles
are no longer applicable in the new digital world, and a new para-
digm is on the horizon. Some of the most fundamental laws of
planning are being broken by the demands of digital channels, so
it’s time to reevaluate your logic.
As you learn more about customer behavior and the ways custom-
ers want to interact with you, explore the impacts on the data and
calculations you use to forecast and staff your business:
»» Work item data reporting is usually based on when work is

completed, not when the work was performed because
most digital solutions only send the work item to the WFM
solution after the work has been completed, and they fail to
account for the fact that a piece of work may have multiple
touch points before being deemed complete.
»» Work items are assumed to be synchronous. Work items
such as social media posts or SMS can span several intervals,
with a lag between an outgoing response and an incoming
one. It’s difficult to plan when work should be happening if
platforms assume that every contact is synchronous and
report only when work is complete.
»» Average handle time (AHT) is shorter than the planning
interval. Traditional WFM systems operate well when AHT is
shorter than the planning interval, but things break down
very quickly when that isn’t the case. For example, if your
planning interval is 30 minutes but it really takes two hours
to complete a work item, traditional WFM systems don’t
know how to deal with the extra time beyond the 30 minutes
you’re trying to plan. They generally force everything into a
single interval, which results in invalid requirement numbers.
»» A work item is processed by a single employee. Traditional
WFM systems fail to account for the fact that work can
actually be put back into a general queue and picked up by
another employee. That’s especially true in environments
with asynchronous deferrable work.
»» An employee works on no more than one work item
concurrently. This is perhaps the most painful issue custom-
ers using traditional WFM solutions are facing. That’s
because concurrency across multiple contacts affects not
only the data but also all the calculations you use to interpret
the data in creating your requirement numbers. It also
impacts how you schedule people and how you treat them
from an intraday and change management perspective.
»» Solutions measure elapsed time rather than in-focus time for
some channel types. An employee may start a chat at 09:50
and finish the chat at 10:20. This results in an elapsed time
of 30 minutes; however, the employee may have only spent
10 minutes actually typing (in-focus time) and the remaining
20 minutes waiting for a customer to respond.
A good example of these challenges is where work is interruptible

or can be paused, such as an email. An employee could pick up an
email at 08:00 and work that item for 10 minutes before pausing it
while they answer some chats. The employee then returns to the
email at 08:30 and works it for another 20 minutes. In the current
digital world, the completed email would fall in the 08:45-09:00
period, with an AHT of 30 minutes, but in reality, there is a work-
load in three different intervals, as shown in Figure 3-1.
FIGURE 3-1: The impacts on interruptible work.
Making Customer Service More

Complex with Bots
With the use of chatbots in contact centers becoming more and
more popular, you may not think the use of these bots will impact
your staffing requirements. Chatbots are a great way to service
your customer queries 24/7 and can help reduce overall contact
rates in your business. While early chatbots lacked flexibility and
could only answer known questions, advances in artificial intelli-
gence and machine learning are fueling bots capable of addressing
a customer’s sentiment or determining when to redirect someone
to a live employee to get a more personal touch. Because chatbots
don’t require any scheduling, and you don’t need to schedule any
employees around chatbots, you could assume there’s no impact
on your WFM practices.
However, because chatbots typically deal with more simple and

straightforward customer queries, the more complex and lon-
ger queries are the ones routed to your employees. These types
of queries tend to take longer to resolve which can result in an
overall increase in AHT because the simpler work is no longer
factored in.
If you introduce chatbot technology, don’t assume that a percent-

age of the work will disappear and that there will be the same
reduction in staffing requirements. Your AHT will almost cer-
tainly increase once the simpler work has been removed.
Because of this paradigm, WFM teams need to consider how well

they can manage long handle times and what tools they need to
ensure truly optimal scheduling. Handle times that are longer
than the planning interval pose a particular challenge for WFM
teams using traditional WFM solutions, which operate well when
AHT is shorter than the planning interval. If, for example, the
back-and-forth of an interaction occurs across two hours but the
planning interval is 30 minutes, traditional WFM solutions force
the time into a single interval, skewing staffing.
Identifying the True Requirements

with Digital Channels
One of the first steps in identifying true staffing requirements for
digital channels is to be able to plan to a common interval length.
With the increase in digital channels, it’s increasingly common
to have omnichannel, blended work streams where an employee
spreads their time across many different channels simultane-
ously. They might even spread their time across different types of
tasks. This has made it much more difficult to view and manage
staffing requirements across contact centers, back offices, and
digital teams.
To fully blend different channels from your front office to your

back office and vice versa, you need a common planning inter-
val to understand what work needs to be performed, regardless
of the environment or organization it belongs to. If your teleph-
ony is planned in 15-minute intervals and your email in 4-hour
intervals, understanding your staffing requirements for each of
those channels is difficult. That’s why work planning and sched-
uling must be normalized to the smallest planning interval for
blended work items. That means taking longer asynchronous
work (whether that’s from a digital contact center or from a back
office), decomposing the time it takes to handle an interaction
into multiple planning intervals, and using this decomposed time
per interaction to forecast work volume and schedule employees.
Being able to view all your channel types and contact volume at
the same level allows you to get much more details into the true
interval level requirements, as shown in Figure 3-2.
FIGURE 3-2: Different channels should be broken down into the same interval
for planning.
The key step to calculating true interval requirements is the
breaking down of long asynchronous contacts into the individ-
ual components of when they’re worked instead of treating the
interaction as one continuous contact. The majority of rout-
ing solutions calculate AHT as elapsed time, meaning they start
the clock when the interaction starts and stop counting when the
interaction is complete. This means contacts that span more than
the planning interval have AHT stored in the interval where the
contact ends, and the AHT is greater than the interval length. The
ability to monitor in-focus AHT is critical to calculating worked
items per interval and storing the AHT of that interaction in the
period the item was worked and not when it was complete. This
new concept is known as true to interval (TTI) analytics. We cover
this topic in more detail in Chapter 4.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Discovering true to interval analytics
»» Looking at new ways works is handled
Chapter 4
Introducing True to
Interval Analytics
W
hen you look at the changes in the contact center indus-
try over the past few years, you may find yourself in a
new era of workforce management (WFM), and you may
look at it differently. With around 87 percent of contact center
employees now working in some form of hybrid way, you need to
understand how this impacts your workforce planning processes.
The nature of the work you do has also changed; you’ve gone from
siloed work streams to omnichannel blended environments where
employees may be assigned to multiple work streams at any given
time. With the expanding choice of digital channels, it also means
that the interactions you handle are no longer contained in the
normal planning intervals (15 or 30 minutes).
The impacts of these changes mean WFM must adapt to accom-

modate working from home and omnichannel blending. It also
means you can no longer just think about how many work items
you need to handle and how long those work items take. Contact
centers must begin to think about what work activity is required
to be worked and how to manage those work items that take
CHAPTER 4 Introducing True to Interval Analytics 21
longer than your standard planning interval. This new paradigm
allows you to think about when you need to work, what you need
to work, and from where you need to do that work.
In this chapter, you explore the new concept of true to interval

(TTI) analytics and how this impacts your WFM solution.
Exploring TTI Analytics

TTI analytics is designed to solve some of the challenges within
the contact center and WFM. People are managing these chal-
lenges with the same calculations and data they have been using
for decades. The problem is that they’re no longer sufficient to
handle the way people work.
Work is becoming more complex — not only do you need to plan

where an employee works, but also you need to think more about
how they work, the tasks assigned, and when specific interval
work actually occurs.
Take a simple example of an email conversation with a customer.

The customer sends an email that takes 2 minutes for the
employee to read and collect the information and a further
5 minutes to type their response. The customer responds
60 minutes later with the required information, and the employee
then takes 3 minutes to resolve and close the customer query. You
can look at this interaction in a number of ways, and each yields
a different forecast and staffing calculation. Check out Figure 4-1
to see this in action.
You can look at this as one interaction that lasted 70 minutes

(this is how most solutions would count and report this inter-
action), or you can see this as one interaction that only lasted
10 minutes (the time the employee was actually working the
email). The other option is to see this as three separate interac-
tions, each with its own handling time.
The concept behind TTI analytics is that you’re able to separate

this interaction into its unique components and report the work
item, the number of times the item was worked, and the handling
time in the intervals when work happened.
FIGURE 4-1: A simple email interaction example.
Breaking the Chains of WFM Paradigms

With TTI analytics, you can look at work differently, which allows
you to forecast, plan, and schedule with a new understanding of
how work is handled. This method breaks the chains of how you
use WFM within the contact center and provides a much more
detailed view of customer behavior and employee workload,
resulting in more effective planning.
By using TTI analytics, you’re able to break the chains of how

you used to use WFM and allow a new era for working in a digital
world. Changes include the following:
»» Forecasts, staff requirements, and schedules are based

on historical patterns of interval-specific work activity.
This accounts for long asynchronous contacts, as well as long
synchronous contacts.
»» Work will no longer be assumed to be synchronous. Work
items can span multiple intervals or even days with a lag
between incoming and outgoing messages.
»» Handling time reported to the interval work occurs.
Reporting handling time only in the interval that work was
completed causes a multitude of issues and inaccuracies
CHAPTER 4 Introducing True to Interval Analytics 23
in staffing requirements. Reporting handle time in every
interval work was performed solves the issues and
inaccuracies.
»» Work items are processed by multiple employees. Work
items don’t always have to be done by the same person, and
the current solutions on the market don’t account for the
fact that work items could be placed back into a general
queue and worked by another employee at a later date. TTI
analytics keeps track of the workload, regardless of who’s
contributing to the workload.
»» Concurrency happens at the channel and employee
level. You no longer have to assume every employee can
work at the same level. Having concurrency set at the
employee level allows for a more accurate staffing
requirement.
»» Contacts don’t always reside on the same channel.
Understanding that a contact may move from one channel
type to another allows you to plan in more detail.
Allowing your WFM solution to understand how work is truly

managed provides businesses with greater forecast and schedule
accuracy. See Chapter 5 for more information on this topic.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Seeing how TTI analytics impact
forecasting
»» Understanding how TTI analytics benefits

your staff
Chapter 5
Solving Problems
with TTI Analytics
T
o truly understand the benefits of true to interval (TTI)
data, you may need to retrain your brain on how you think
about data reporting. If you stop focusing on “total time”
and “work item counting” and the idea that you can only report
an interaction when it ends before you can include it in your
reporting, you can start to understand the benefits of TTI analytics.
You need to think about reporting activity as it happens and when
it happens so you can improve the way you plan for digital
channels.
By applying this logic to your workforce management (WFM) data,

not only will you know when a contact is answered but also when
a contact becomes active. It will be reporting work to the interval
when work occurred. This means that whether the contact is syn-
chronous or asynchronous, even with long handling time, you’ll
be able to segment these contacts into something that’s useable
for WFM to the lowest planning granularity.
CHAPTER 5 Solving Problems with TTI Analytics 25
This new paradigm of how to calculate and report data has a
significant impact on how you use WFM. Your forecast, staff-
ing requirements, and schedules are driven by patterns of inter-
val specific activity instead of just case counts or when a contact
ended. A work item is reported to the interval in which it was
initially answered and all subsequent intervals it was worked.
Handle time is reported in the intervals where the work occurred,
thereby connecting the time to the volume, even if that work is
completed by a different employee.
In this chapter, you explore more about how TTI analytics impacts
both forecasting and staffing calculations and discover some of
the additional considerations for WFM.
Identifying How TTI Analytics

Impacts Forecasting
One of the key requirements for creating a forecast in WFM is hav-
ing historical interval-based volume and handling time that can
be used to predict the future. No matter which forecasting method
you use — weighted moving average, Box-Jenkins ARIMA, Expo-
nential Smoothing, or any other statistical model — they all rely
on historical data to help predict future patterns and trends.
For more traditional channels like voice and live chat, these meth-
ods are used to predict the likelihood of when a new contact will
arrive and how long that contact will take. Because these types
of channels tend to be immediate response and have short han-
dling times, the data you currently use in most cases is sufficient.
However, even with these channel types, long handling times can
skew the data you use and provide forecasting challenges.
Take the example of a business that operates from 09:00 a.m. to

05:00 p.m. and operates in 15-minute intervals. When you have
long handling times, these can have impacts on both the first and
last statistical interval because the contacts aren’t counted when
they arrive or when they’re worked. They’re only counted when
the contact ended (WCE), as shown in Figure 5-1.
FIGURE 5-1: How contacts are currently recorded when using WCE with long
handling times.
As you can see from this example, despite receiving ten calls in
the first interval, only four are reported because the remaining
six are reported in the following intervals due to the handling
time being longer than the statistical interval. This is also true of
the last interval because contacts are reported in the 17:00-17:15
interval even though the business isn’t open. This phenomenon
may impact many intervals throughout the day, especially when
contacts arrive in erratic patterns. With immediate response chan-
nels, this can cause issues with interval based forecast accuracy.
When you look at digital channels, this problem is compounded

because digital channels tend to be asynchronous and have long life
spans. In Figure 5-2, you assume a contact arrives in the 09:00-
09:15 interval and is picked up by an employee. The employee
spends 25 minutes working that interaction and completes it in
the 09:30-09:45 interval. With the data you receive today, WFM
would only see that contact in the 09:30-09:45 interval. If this
was a regular occurrence, your WFM forecast, regardless of the
model you use, would forecast zero contacts in the first two inter-
vals. You’d also see no handling time but would see a higher than
period length handling time in the 09:30-09:45 interval.
FIGURE 5-2: Digital interactions and how they’re currently forecasted.
With TTI analytics, you can use the same example but with a very
different outcome on the forecast (see Figure 5-3). As you see in
this example, you have a record for when the item was initially
answered and also when that item was active (meaning the item
was being worked but isn’t a new contact). This means that not
only will you be able to forecast more accurately, but also you’ll
receive more detailed reporting of handling time across intervals.
FIGURE 5-3: How interactions are reported using TTI analytics.
Looking at the Benefits of TTI Analytics

on Staffing Requirements
The impact TTI analytics can have on staffing requirements and,
ultimately, schedules is also significant. With the current meth-
ods based on WCE, not only will you forecast inaccurate or zero
contacts in certain intervals, but also you could forecast more
or less staff than you actually need. This challenge is common
in many businesses and relies on forecasters and schedulers to
manually adjust the forecast to ensure that they have accurate
staffing requirements.
This manual intervention is time consuming and introduces the

element of human error, and the WFM team is making assump-
tions without having the true information to make a prediction.
The risks introduced with incorrect requirements can be cause

for concern, especially in contact centers that operate flexible
scheduling, meaning your WFM system decides when people are
needed based on the staffing requirements. Scheduling people to
the wrong interval or even worse, not scheduling anyone at all,
could have significant impacts on your customers.
In today’s world, most systems only count contacts after the work
is complete, and handling time is reported only in the interval in
which the work is completed, even if that time spanned several
previous intervals. This is shown in Figure 5-4.
FIGURE 5-4: How staffing calculations are performed today, using WCE
reporting.
For Figure 5-4, keep in mind the following:
»» It shows that there’s no handling time or staffing require-

ments in the first two intervals because the work isn’t
counted until it’s completed in the 09:30 period. This could
result in no or too few employees scheduled in the first two
intervals, but it also shows the requirement in the 09:30
interval as being two full-time equivalents (FTE), which is
fundamentally wrong.
»» A contact is counted only once in the interval in which it
ends, even if the contact spans multiple intervals.
»» Handle time is reported only in the interval in which the
contact ends.
With TTI analytics, a new concept called Active is introduced,

which identifies that a piece of work is being handled, even
though it’s not a new work item. You also segment the handling
time into the interval when the work was actually done. This not
only allows WFM to calculate true handling time within each
interval the work is being done, but also it allows WFM to under-
stand that a staffing requirement exists in each interval since the
work arrived and will provide a more accurate staffing require-
ment across these intervals. This process is shown in Figure 5-5.
Long synchronous and asynchronous interactions are reported

using the new answered and active TTI paradigm as
»» A contact is counted once in the interval in which it’s initially

answered. If the contact spans intervals, it’s counted again in
each subsequent interval where activity occurred.
FIGURE 5-5: How staffing calculations are performed with answered and
active TTI analytics.
»» Handle time is reported in each interval in which work

activity occurs.
TTI analytics allows contact centers to get a much more accu-

rate view of how digital work is completed and provides greater
insight into how staffing requirements should be calculated.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Seeing the impact of TTI analytics
»» Introducing NICE CXone ACD
»» Harnessing the power of CXone contact

routing
Chapter 6
Considerations for TTI
Analytics and Digital
Channel Management
T
rue to interval (TTI) analytics can help improve your
forecasting and staffing requirements. It also brings some
changes in the way you may operate today. Those busi-
nesses that have undergone a digital transformation project have
been introduced to some new concepts such as concurrency and
interruptible channels that typically only apply to digital chan-
nels. Another new concept these businesses face or encounter is
elevated contacts — when an agent adds an outbound channel,
such as a voice call, to a digital interaction to achieve first call
resolution. With TTI analytics and workforce management
(WFM), you need to fully understand how these new concepts
truly change the way you manage your contact center. Consider
the impacts TTI analytics and digital channels have on your WFM
solution and employees.
In this chapter, you uncover some of the impacts TTI analytics

may have on the methodologies you have come to know through
your adoption of digital channels. We introduce the NICE CXone
platform and how this solution, along with WFM, brings about
this new paradigm of TTI analytics.
CHAPTER 6 Considerations for TTI Analytics and Digital Channel Management 31
Uncovering the Impacts of TTI Analytics
With the adoption of digital channels, employees may be able to
handle more than one contact at a time. Chat or social messaging
is a way to interact with multiple customers; while one customer
is typing a response, an employee can greet a new customer from
the queue. This concept of simultaneous assignment of more than
one work item to a single employee is called concurrency. Con-
currency introduces a special challenge in calculation of staffing
requirements.
Staffing requirements are calculated using the inputs of volume

(number of work items) and handle time. When the reporting
system (automatic contact distributor [ACD], chat system, work
inventory system, and so on) is only able to report handle time as
the total “lifespan” of the contact, that’s called elapsed handled time.
Figure 6-1 shows you that handle time is double counted when
reported as elapsed time. For example, assume an employee is
working on two customer chats at the same time (concurrency
of two); they both start at 08:00 and finish at 08:30. This means
that you have two interactions with a lifespan (elapsed time) of
30 minutes. However, the employee only spends around 15 minutes
in total chatting to each customer and the other 15 minutes wait-
ing for the customer to respond. With existing solutions that only
report elapsed time, you must factor in concurrency to understand
the true workload. (Note: Existing solutions also tend to report all
the handling time in the last interval, which causes inaccurate
staffing calculations.)
FIGURE 6-1: How two simultaneous chats look with today’s solutions.
As you can imagine, using elapsed handle time (elapsed average

handle time [AHT]) overstates the staffing requirement calcula-
tion because time is double, triple, or quadruple counted. In fact,
when using elapsed time, the time is counted for every contact
that’s running concurrently with the employee, so the overstate-
ment is a function of the number of contacts assigned concur-
rently. If you fail to account for concurrency in your calculations,
you’ll have a staffing requirement much higher than needed. In
this example, the workload is 30 minutes (2 x 30) / 2 (Concur-
rency) = 30 minutes. The basic calculation for this would be:
(# of Chats x AHT) / Concurrency = Workload Minutes
Modifying the elapsed AHT by a concurrency assumption doesn’t

produce an accurate understanding of exactly how much of the
elapsed AHT is actually spent focused on each chat and how much
is spent waiting for a customer to respond.
With TTI analytics, concurrency adjustments are no longer required

because you’re able to see the active work item and the true “in-
focus” AHT of each interaction, as shown in Figure 6-2.
FIGURE 6-2: A TTI chat interaction.
If you take the two chat examples but view them with TTI analytics,
you can see that the employee is only ever active (“in-focus”) on
one chat in any given interval. Furthermore, with TTI analytics,
the handle time is reported in the interval in which the work was
performed. This means with TTI analytics and WFM you no lon-
ger need to factor in concurrency. You get a much more accurate
handling time of each interaction because you’re only factoring in
the time the employee was engaged in each chat.
Introducing NICE CXone ACD
Part of the NICE CXone customer experience platform is the NICE
CXone ACD. With CXone ACD, you can intelligently route contacts
in any channel to the best available employee to handle them.
A single routing engine allows the contact center to flexibly choose
from a wealth of routing modes, including intelligent skill-based,
attributes (bullseye), data-driven and AI-powered routing. CXone
ACD empowers your employees to work on multiple interactions
concurrently, which helps drive efficiency and productivity within
your business. The CXone solution provides your employees with
customer data and cross-channel interaction. Not only can CXone
help increase customer satisfaction by adding channels to per-
sonalized interactions, but also it uses AI-powered bots and
self-service to automate routine tasks.
The NICE CXone ACD also has embedded TTI data analytics capa-
bilities, allowing it to capture what really happens during a cus-
tomer interaction, especially when an employee concurrently
handles more than one interaction and you need to understand
which interaction is in focus to accurately represent customer
interaction, employee workload, and AHT that feeds your NICE
WFM solution. This data, combined with the power of NICE
WFM, provides your business with a wealth of knowledge about
your customer interactions and your employee interactions with
customers.
With NICE CXone ACD, you can
»» Help more customers, faster. Quickly connect more

customers with the best resource and resolve more interac-
tions faster regardless of channel.
»» Give employees more context. Differentiated routing uses
customer data and sentiment for a better customer experi-
ence. Employees can use customer data to personalize each
contact.
»» Connect every customer to the right employee. Match
customers to employees using customer data, sentiment,
analytics, or AI-powered profiles for consolidated routing
across all channels.
»» Empower business users. Use an intuitive, visual tool with
predefined components that enable almost anyone to make
simple changes, and collaborate on routing flows, enabling
even non-programmers to contribute.
NICE CXone ACD routes any contact, regardless of channel, to

the employee by using one consolidated interface for handling.
This interface enables your employees to handle both synchro-
nous and asynchronous digital and voice (inbound and outbound)
interactions in the same tool — no need to juggle multiple win-
dows. Access to customer data, sentiment, and interaction history
makes personalizing contact handling easier for your employ-
ees. At the same time, you can increase employee productivity by
routing multiple digital contacts to an employee for concurrent
handling. And because employees have anytime access to real-
time queue information, they can better self-manage and ensure
that they stay on top of things.
Understanding the Power

of CXone Contact Routing
NICE CXone provides no-code/low-code interfaces to stream-
line integration with external tools and data sources, such as a
customer relationship management (CRM), ticketing system, or
other data repository, making them available to the ACD so that
customer records are available for data-driven routing and to
personalize interactions throughout the customer journey. You
can easily collect customer data in the front-end by using a seam-
lessly integrated native voice portal (Interactive Voice Response,
IVR) that supports Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and
Text-to-Speech (TTS) functionality, or a native chatbot with or
without artificial intelligence (AI) — the choice is yours. Seamless
integration makes it easy to pass data back and forth between a
chatbot, an IVR or Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA), a CRM or cus-
tomer database, and the ACD. This makes creating intelligent,
data-driven routing and self-service flows so much easier.
Advanced computer telephony integration (CTI) and CRM integra-
tions also help you provide your employees with the information
and customer data they need to personalize interactions regardless
of channel. An integrated customer card is like a one-stop shop
for employees with everything they need from customer data to
cross-channel interaction history to provide a highly personalized
customer experience.
You can seamlessly integrate self-service options, including AI

bots and voice portal functionality, to increase productivity and
enable bots to take on routine interactions so that your employees
can focus on higher value, more complex interactions.
The CXone intelligent routing engine matches customer requests

based on skills, natural language analytics, and AI-powered
behavioral profiles. It consolidates routing across inbound
and outbound, digital and voice, employee-assisted, and self-
service channels. The ACD ensures that every interaction is routed
to the best available employee in the least amount of time. You
can use customer data and sentiment, predictive behavioral rout-
ing, skill-based, attribute (bullseye) routing, and data-directed
omnichannel routing with one universal queue for inbound and
outbound voice as well as digital channels. Cases, paper mail, or
even faxes can be routed using the work item channel, if needed.
The NICE CXone ACD allows you to put your contact center on
auto-pilot with workforce intelligence that allows you to create
rules that automatically trigger corrective action when configu-
rable thresholds based on real-time statistics, such as service
level or average wait time, are broken.
NICE CXone is a complete customer experience platform, unifying

all interaction channels in one solution with common administra-
tion, routing, reporting and analytics, and native, integrated WFM.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Considering generational impacts on
digital channels
»» Discovering the future of AI technology

on digital channels
Chapter 7
Looking to the Future
of Digital Channel
Management and WFM
H
ow you communicate with people often comes down to
personal choice, but this choice is heavily influenced by
your background and the environment you’re used to.
People don’t tend to change what they do unless there’s a valid or
justified reason.
With the introduction of new technology such as artificial

intelligence (AI)-driven chatbots like ChatGPT, and the impact
age demographics have on the channels you use, the future of
digital channels and the impact they have on your workforce
management (WFM) system need to be thoroughly explored.
In this chapter, you look at how digital channel communica-

tion will change and how technology plays a big part in those
communication methods.
CHAPTER 7 Looking to the Future of Digital Channel Management and WFM 37
Unwrapping the Generational
Impacts on Digital Channels
Telephones or handwritten letters used to be the only way to com-
municate with companies until the introduction of fax machines
in the 1980s. This didn’t change until the late 1990s when email
became a popular method of communication with customers, and
it remained like this for many years.
Fast forward 30+ years, and the number of communication chan-

nels is vast, but each generation has become accustomed to what
they know. The generation difference in communication channels
is quite important to businesses, and you need to ensure that as
generations move on, your business moves on with them.
Certain generations expect personalization and an actual human

to handle their queries. They’re happy to wait to get their desired
outcome. However, some generations are quite content to send
asynchronous messages that may span a long period or chat over
social media to have their queries answered. The newest genera-
tions expect automation and quick-and-easy interactions, and
they aren’t concerned if that interaction is from a human or an
AI-driven chatbot.
For now, voice remains the channel of choice for the vast majority
of customers. However, with the introduction of new AI-driven
technologies, you may see the adoption of digital channels grow
even faster than anticipated. Many companies already offer a fully
digital customer experience because their products match a cer-
tain customer demographic. It’s this emerging generation that
has grown up with social media, voice messaging, and AI and
drives the future of your communication channels.
Exploring the Future of AI Technology

on Digital Channels
One of the fastest growing digital communication channels is
AI-driven chatbots. This new generation of enhanced natural
language (NL) solutions means customers can have a real con-
versation without the need of a human (or at least that’s the
general assumption). While these technologies are still in their
early stages, the potential for these chatbots within the contact
center industry is huge.
The chatbot market is expected to grow considerably over the

next few years. The need to provide 24/7 customer service, reduce
operational costs, and watch the rise in customer demands for
self-service has led to increased usage of chatbots. This can also
be attributed to the growing preference of individuals toward
messaging applications over social networking sites. The trends
in the North American chatbot market are shown in Figure 7-1.
FIGURE 7-1: The expected growth of chatbot usage by industry.
How this new technology will change the way you operate your
contact centers is not yet fully understood, but it will change from
what you do now. This means your WFM processes and the way
you think about your workforce will shift. You need to understand
how these bots influence your customer behavior and the need for
those customers to interact with a human. More complex queries
will certainly need human intervention, so while live employee
demand may drop, average handling time (AHT) will increase.
These new emerging chatbots can help smooth out spikes in your
customer demand by triggering AI bots in busy times that will
then influence your staffing requirements.
CHAPTER 7 Looking to the Future of Digital Channel Management and WFM 39
Conversational AI is also an emerging form of technology that will
make its way into the contact center world. This is a type of AI that
can simulate a human conversation. Conversational AI systems
are trained on large amounts of data such as text and speech. This
data is used to teach the system how to understand and process
human language. The system then uses this knowledge to interact
with humans in a natural way. It’s constantly learning from its
interactions and improving its response quality over time.
One thing you must also consider is how this new technology can
be used by your contact center employees. Using AI chatbots as a
knowledge base to quickly access information, FAQs, and answers
to infrequent but complex queries will only improve the customer
journey. AI bots for employees will help reduce AHT and improve
first contact resolution (FCR), which will then influence your
future demand.
An increase in the use of voice notes, which are interactions over

social channels using voice messages to communicate with people,
is also trending. This will certainly be a channel for consideration
in the future, and you’ll see a reduction in the more traditional
channels such as telephone and email.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding your strategy
»» Being realistic and flexible
»» Exploring your solutions and options
»» Considering consolidation
Chapter 8
Ten Thoughts for True
to Interval Analytics
in WFM
I
t’s a tradition that For Dummies books end with a Part of Tens
chapter. To keep that tradition alive, this chapter gives you ten
considerations for true to interval (TTI) analytics for digital
channels and workforce management (WFM).
Understand Your Customers

One of the key concepts when adopting digital channels is to
understand your customers. Why explore digital channels if your
customers won’t use them? Or more importantly, why resist the
need to implement digital channels if that’s what your customers
demand?
The demographic of your customers is changing, and each gen-

eration uses technology differently, so it’s important that your
business evolves with your customers.
CHAPTER 8 Ten Thoughts for True to Interval Analytics in WFM 41
Customer Choice is Key
Giving your customers the right methods to contact your business
is crucial to the success of digital channel adoption. However, you
must make sure your business is ready to handle these channels
in the right way.
Ensure that the channels you adopt are not only right for your
customers but also that you have the right processes and tools in
place to respond to those customers in a timely manner via the
methods they choose. Offering customers one method to contact
your business but then not responding in a reasonable time frame
or using a different method because you aren’t digitally ready
would be a mistake.
Identify the Right People

As the demographic of your customers is changing, so is the dem-
ographic of your employees, and you must consider this when
deciding how to staff the channels of your choice. Not everyone is
digitally savvy, so don’t assume that everyone can do everything.
You may find that when recruiting new employees there will be
some who are really good at talking, and some who are really good
at typing, but they may not be good at both. Having the right
people for the right channels is critical, and getting the wrong
people for the task could lead to failure.
Know Your Strategy

It is important to know what the process and end goal of your
digital journey are and to ensure that the steps you take are fully
geared toward achieving that goal. If your objective is to reduce
contacts through digital channels, you must make sure the tech-
nology you implement will service your customers in the right way.
Getting this wrong will only lead to customers becoming frus-

trated, causing repeat contacts via other channels, lower cus-
tomer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter scores (NPS), and
eventually customer churn.
Explore Your Data
This may sound obvious, but you must make sure the technology
you implement for your digital channels provides you with the
right data. Proper data analytics provided by the sending system
to WFM is the foundation for accurate WFM processes. If you get
your data wrong, everything else falls apart.
Ensure that your data is reporting contacts to the right interval

and that long or asynchronous handling times aren’t skewing
where contacts are reported.
Be Realistic
When implementing digital channels, be realistic about what you
can achieve. Setting a concurrency of five chats may be possi-
ble, but is it realistic in your business? Do your systems allow
employees to switch quickly and easily between different chan-
nels if they’re interruptible?
Consider the impact digital channels have on your employees.

Regularly switching between different channel types may impact
the quality and performance of your employees. Setting too high
concurrency or interruptible channels could cause issues with
cognitive load limits and cause employees to become stressed.
Identify the Benefits

Digital channels can bring many benefits to your business and
you should explore all the possibilities and not constrain yourself
to what you’ve always known. Digital channels have been key to
the adoption of remote working, allowing employees to do work
from anywhere at any time without the need to be in the office.
They can also provide automation with the use of chatbots and
efficiencies by allowing concurrent interactions.
CHAPTER 8 Ten Thoughts for True to Interval Analytics in WFM 43
Explore Your Solutions
Ensure that you fully explore the capabilities of your solutions
to maximize the art of the possible. When implementing digital
channels, there’s so much more you can do with them compared
to traditional voice channels.
Adding links to FAQ pages on chat or messaging channels can

help reduce customer contact volume. Adding chatbots to handle
some of the basic queries is a great way to help your customers get
the information they need at any time.
Flexibility Is Good
With the ever-increasing adoption of home working, employees
are becoming more and more flexible in the way they work. Hav-
ing this flexibility in your business is key when it comes to digital
channels.
With more traditional channel types, such as voice, you needed

the employees to be available when your customers needed them,
but with digital channels, this is no longer the case. Having
employees work at times that suits them has little or no impact
on some digital channels, but the benefits to the employees and
improvement in employee satisfaction could be huge.
Consolidate When Possible

The wealth of channel types available to customers can some-
times make it hard for businesses to keep up, especially if those
channels reside on different platforms such as chat, social, direct
messaging, and voice.
It may be time to consider consolidating all these channels into

a single omnichannel platform that can handle all your channel
types. This allows you to have a single source of data instead of
trying to tie together multiple customer interactions from a vari-
ety of different platforms.
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CHAPTER 1: The Evolution of Digital Channels................................... 3

CHAPTER 2: Exploring the Role of WFM with

CHAPTER 3: Changing WFM Paradigms with

CHAPTER 4: Introducing True to Interval Analytics...................... 21

CHAPTER 5: Solving Problems with TTI Analytics........................... 25

CHAPTER 6: Considerations for TTI Analytics and Digital

Table of Contents iii

CHAPTER 8: Ten Thoughts for True to Interval

The nature of work is changing, and we must adapt to these

About This Book

Tips give you actionable insights and considerations for digital

This information gives you key things to remember about digital

In order to make your processes run smoothly, take note of this

We want to provide you as much detail as possible without getting

This icon provides details of new concepts and ideas brought

Beyond the Book

»» Facing the challenges of digital channels

However, in the past few years, there’s been an increase in WFM

CHAPTER 1 The Evolution of Digital Channels 3

Understanding How the Nature

With customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter scores (NPS)

If you have a wide and varied customer demographic, it’s impor-

Customers want and expect more choices in how they interact

»» Baby Boomers: Having grown up in the age of the tele-

CHAPTER 1 The Evolution of Digital Channels 5

Identifying the Complexities

Companies are realizing that the siloed approach to handling

This multiskilled, omnichannel approach is not only complex,

FIGURE 1-1: An employee may be required to handle multiple channel types.

At the same time the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to

Companies started rethinking how their workspaces were

CHAPTER 1 The Evolution of Digital Channels 7

»» Working with forecasting and staffing

Workforce solutions are accustomed to generating forecasts

CHAPTER 2 Exploring the Role of WFM with Digital Channels 9

Predicting workloads and creating schedules for digital channels

In this chapter, you take a deeper look at why digital channel

Digging into the Importance of Digital

The customer doesn’t differentiate between traditional ­contact

Poor management of digital channels will only lead to customers

With digital channels, your communication may be visible to a

Businesses are at a greater risk of losing consumers than they

CHAPTER 2 Exploring the Role of WFM with Digital Channels 11

While businesses may perceive that consumers are more patient

Businesses consider that the majority of consumers are very

Understanding Forecasting and Staffing

»» Immediate response channels require an employee to

These two types of interactions also have many different attri-

»» Simultaneous interaction types: An employee engages in

CHAPTER 2 Exploring the Role of WFM with Digital Channels 13

This calculation, referred to as concurrency, allows your WFM

The world of forecasting and staffing is becoming far more com-

»» Realizing the impact of bots on customer

»» Identifying digital channel requirements

CHAPTER 3 Changing WFM Paradigms with Digital Channels 15

»» Work item data reporting is usually based on when work is

A good example of these challenges is where work is interruptible

FIGURE 3-1: The impacts on interruptible work.

Making Customer Service More

The customer doesn’t differentiate between traditional contact

Take a simple example of an email conversation with a customer.