It’s not uncommon for people to get confused between acronyms or software category types and one common mistake in our industry is thinking WFM is the same as WFO.

Both WFM and WFO are invaluable in the contact centre and when first investigating potential systems and business partners to work with it can be easy to get confused.

• WFM = Workforce Management
• WFO = Workforce Optimisation

Workforce Management

You can argue that Workforce Management is a series of processes and procedures, but the terminology is used to describe a software application that helps a contact centre with:

• Forecasting demand
• Managing certain staff details
• Scheduling the staff at the most optimal time for everyone involved
• Supporting the key operational decisions during the day
• Understanding the contact centre’s performance

Some of these things can be done on paper and in Excel. However, it’s not long in today’s age of complex rules, varied skills, long opening hours and trying to give your employee’s a work-life balance that Excel just can’t cut it.

Workforce Optimisation

Workforce Optimisation is a broader list of key contact centre tools including Workforce Management (WFM)!

Workforce Optimisation includes:

• Workforce Management
• Call Recording
• Quality Monitoring
• Customer Feedback
• Speech Analytics
• Text Analytics
• Data Analytics
• Performance Management