That’s right: I’m spending your money. But you won’t mind . . . if you’ve got a first-tier WFM solution in place.

Here’s why.

Start with your agents. The goals here include improving call handling performance, and motivating and retaining agents. WFM systems help achieve those goals with smarter scheduling, gamification and continual coaching. Lifestyle scheduling makes it easy to use highly productive scheduling techniques, including flexible schedules, shift swapping, and vacation planning. Gamification delivers proven ways to create an energetic and constructively competitive workplace. Better schedules allow more time for group training and individual coaching: both of which improve performance.

You see the results in terms of reduced call length, increased answer times, higher first call resolution rates, lower absenteeism, and longer employee retention.

And when you’ve got a staff that performs that well, you have to give them a raise, don’t you?

Move on to your team leaders. The complex scheduling is handled by the WFM system (even shift swaps and vacation planning). A lot of it is done through agent self service. More importantly, those schedules are based on complex intraday analytics—that lets your team leaders plan shifts more efficiently and more productively. Now you’re using less people to handle more calls successfully. This liberates the leaders to work more with their team than with their spreadsheet.

You see the results in terms of lower staff costs per shift, increased levels of training (which in turn supports a move to multi-skill staffing), and less time spent on crisis management.

And when team leaders perform that well, you have to give them a raise too, don’t you?

What about executive leadership? The schedules team leaders have to craft are only as good as the forecasts they work with. The best WFM systems perform very granular analyses of historical data to help them produce excellent forecasts. These forecasts look well beyond call volume, and take into account unusual events, agent skills (including multi-skill agents), predictable call intent by day of month and time of day, and more. (I touch on forecasting in more detail in this post).

You see the results in reduced levels of both overstaffing and understaffing—critical KPIs for both call center costs and customer satisfaction.

And when your executive leadership performs that well, their bonus has to kick in, doesn’t it?

Finally, let’s look at the business itself. This is the easiest of all: it’s one simple question.

What happens when agents are more productive, team leaders more efficient, and executive planning is more informed, intelligent and accurate?

Increased profit.

And when you’re more profitable, everybody deserves a raise, don’t they?