In the context of call center management, workforce management (WFM) is both a residual and inherent benefit of automating the whole process. The calls come in and go up on the rep’s scoreboard and the stats don’t lie. They are what they are and you use them to reward, motivate or penalize call center performers.

You also use the WFM product for the indispensable analysis tools it provides. You track everything along a timeline or a number line. You get sweet pie graphs or busy bar charts that tell a curved or linear story of what’s happening now and likely to happen in the future, given the same ingredients.

Workforce Management data provides real-time indicators on how things are going in the contact center as opposed to how you thought they would go. If a call center agent is fudging and fidgeting instead of being on-task and focusing, it’s all there in the gentle confrontation of the facts and figures of the impersonal analytics.

It’s all in the ingredients. If the indicators are spiking at certain times and you want to flatten that spike, you need to tweak the time vs. resources vs. reps in the center ratios to shorten what needs to be shortened and raise what needs to be raised.

You may know all that, but here are some interesting facts about the abbreviation WFM, which is a three-letter acronym with more than one meaning in the business and scientific communities. WFM also stands for:

• Waveform monitor. That’s a type of oscilloscope that monitors video signals. Call center WFM, when it comes to analytics, does rather the same thing, but it monitors data so you can see how it oscillates.
• Wideband FM. That’s a radio frequency, and analytics is all about frequency in a wide spectrum of performance management and business analysis.
• Western Federation of Miners. Call center automation with WFM is the ultimate data monitor.
• Whole Foods Market. Call center WFM data is the kind of a food that your accounting people crave.
• Wired for Management. That’s a term applied to the standard for management computer systems. Call center WFM is up and running and wired for immediate service.

Then there’s the internet slang/SMS texting abbreviation of “WFM,” which means “works for me.” The latter is probably the most cogent, because work force management actually works for everyone and encompasses just about every activity related to your company’s business.  It’s not so much data mining as it is data attraction through your call center.

That data works for you and your reps in ways that are nowhere similar to over supervising, but provide real-time indicators on how things are going as opposed to how you thought they would go. If one of your reps is fudging and fidgeting instead of being on task and focusing, it’s all there in the gentle confrontation of the facts and figures of the impersonal analytics.

Finally, as mentioned in the Whole Foods Market parallel, WFM works for your business in ways that make the nice people in accounting happy with the totally accurate and honest data collection so that they can do all the things they get paid to do in an oh-so-much-easier way.