As the world is becoming increasingly ambiguous, the language of the people is also becoming shorter and more precise to save “time”.
It’s not a bad thing to use abbreviations or concise words where you can have a 5-minute conversation in 5 words, but most of us still don’t have a clue what the other person is talking about.
So, in order to help you understand most of the terms being used in the world of customer service and workforce management, we have made a list for you in this article, so that the next time you get on a call with the workforce, you will know what to say and what you are hearing, from the other end.
The 25 Workforce Management Terms for You to Know in 2023
Here are 25 of the most important workforce management terms that you need to know in 2023.
1. Abandonment Rate
The abandonment rate is the contact volume of the customers that have approached the business for a query or a service and have left without getting any help from the staff.
These are the people, and we have all been one of them, who hang up the phone in frustration because the customer support staff is taking too long to resolve their ticket.
2. Agent Performance
This term describes the way the agent working for the company is performing against predetermined target metrics. Are these agents hitting all of the targets that they have been assigned, and are they really delivering on them or just slowly going with the flow?
3. Asynchronous Communication
Asynchronous communication defines the contacts that don’t need to be answered in real-time. In the case of an email, this is the message which you send to the client or any recipient and carry on with your day while you wait for an answer to it.
4. Break Tolerance
Break tolerance describes a company’s leniency for their agents or staff members to have flexible working and break schedules.
As we know that in some companies around the world, agents don’t have to rigidly stick to the schedule that they are assigned, and they can start their breaks sooner or later than previously planned. This is the company’s break tolerance for their employees.
5. Clock in
This is the time when a CX agent begins their work tasks in the morning or the evening, depending on their shift timing. You can also call it punching in.
6. Clock out
This is the time when a CX agent finishes up their daily tasks and leaves work. This can be in the morning or the evening, depending on their shift timing. You can also call it punching out.
7. Contact Volume
One of the most important workforce management terms is contact volume. This term tells us about the number of inbound contacts that come in contact with the company during a specific period of time through any or every contact channel of the business.
8. Constraints
These are the limitations and conditions that change when or in which communication channels of the company can an agent be scheduled.
9. Customer Satisfaction Survey
This is a survey that is sent out by the customer support teams to gather customer satisfaction data which is judged by a range of different metrics set by the company.
These surveys are quite short and are very useful in the case of an agent to earn privileges or promotions based on how well they do on them.
10. Dynamic Scheduling
This workforce management term tells us about the way you can schedule the intraday activities of your entire CX workforce.
11. Forecast
Forecast is a term that predicts the volume of work that is going to be done in a specific time period based on the volume from a previous work timeframe.
12. Full-Time Equivalent (FTE)
As we know that a full-time workday is typically 8 hours in a single day. So, if any team member or any professional is scheduled to work for 8 hours is a 1.0 FTE.
13. Handled Volume
This is the total number of contracts that the workforce has successfully handled in a specific time period.
14. Historical Contact Volume
This is the historical data that is collected from all of the different communication channels where the customers of the business reach out to it like chats, emails, tickets, social media, etc.
15. Intraday Plan
This is the proper plan for the activities that your agent is going to perform for each working day.
16. Interactive Voice Response
This term tells us about the technology that is being used by a company to allow a human to be in contact with a database over a phone.
17. Longest Wait Time
This workforce management term tells us about the longest time it took for an agent to answer a question that a customer had during a set time period.
18. Non-Contact activities, Non-Support Activities, Non-Productive Activities
These are all of the activities that are performed by the support agents without being in contact with the customers between the time they clock in and clock out.
19. Normalized
Normalized data is such information that you have collected from your communication channels for such a long time that it evens out the glare of the outliers.
20. Open Shifts
In workforce management, there will surely come a time when you are going to be severely understaffed. When that happens, you can send out a request to every able professional that is available for work to cover a shift. These types of shifts are known as open shifts.
21. Payroll Integration
This is software or a system that can be hooked up with your workforce management solution in real time and manage payroll duties.
22. Predicted Future Volume
This is the contact volume that has been anticipated by the managers as a result of forecasting.
23. Real-Time Channels
These are all of the communication channels where the customers and the support agents interact with each other in real-time about issues and queries.
24. Ring Group
In order to make your customer support more effective, you need to sort them into groups and whenever a query or an issue comes up, you should direct it to the right department. These groups that you created to sort your agents in are the ring groups.
25. Service Level Agreements
These are the agreements that customers create with the clients for answering different calls or queries. They are properly defined per channel.
Conclusion
This was our collection of the most popular workforce management terms that you need to know in 2023. Let us know if you have any other terms to add to this article in the comments.
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