Salesforce Workforce Management: Time Clock, Scheduling & PTO Tracking

An engaged and motivated workforce is the key to a successful business today. It’s impossible to provide customers with an exceptional experience and boost sales without catering to the needs of your own employees. So, to fully equip managers with the tools they need to keep their employees happy, Salesforce has come up with an innovative solution in the form of Salesforce Workforce Management.

What is Workforce Management?

Workforce management is the set of products that focuses on helping companies manage and improve their employee engagement. Employee engagement is a fundamental concept that has both qualitative and quantitative aspects. The qualitative aspect describes the nature of the relationship between the organization and the employees and then the quantitative aspect accounts for employee engagement at every step of their employment. Starting from recruitment, onboarding, time management, quality, and feedback management also collecting feedback from the employees, the whole journey is included in workforce engagement management. 

What is Salesforce Workforce Engagement Management?

Salesforce workforce Engagement management is an advanced solution that addresses the need for workforce engagement management at contact centers, across B2B and B2C industries. Salesforce workforce engagement management allows the service department to improve their workforce performance, maintain agility and match customer demand with dynamic intelligent forecasting, multi-channel and multi-skill capacity planning. It also empowers team staffing optimization with powerful executive dashboards, along with agent empowerment with personalized real-time onboarding and coaching as well. Workforce management system Salesforce is a single agile platform that can be fully integrated from any source, internal or external, to provide the best experience to contact center employees.

Why is Workforce Engagement Management Essential Today?

The common rule we all think businesses are based on these days is that exceptional customer experience results in higher sales and profits. The fact that better customer experience results in higher revenues have already been established and proven long ago. However, further research in this domain has interestingly linked a better customer experience with a better employee experience. Revenue growth is directly linked to higher employee experience, companies that have both high employee and customer experiences achieve almost double the revenue growth as those that do not. 

No doubt, in today’s digital era AI and automation has made it possible for managers to create better employee experience. They can now easily relieve people of tedious tasks and allow them to use higher-level skills like empathy and strategic thinking. It has also made it possible to free up time for career development and professional training. These are the reasons that almost all companies today are investing in workforce engagement management solutions.

How Workforce Management System by Salesforce Helps for Better Planning & Execution

It’s been rightly said that if you fail to plan, then you’re planning to fail. Workforce management is the most essential part of planning for a contact center. Without a thoughtful and robust plan, plenty of golden opportunities can be missed or valuable resources can go to waste. The right workforce planning model is essential for contact centers because the criteria for success lies in providing the customers with the right agent, equipped with the right skills, at the right time.

Planners need to address the following three concerns while plotting a working plan for a contact center:

1. Work
2. Capacity Plan
3. Experts

Factor 1: The Work

In simplest terms, work is when a customer interacts with the business. The means through which customers can now interact with businesses has increased significantly as compared to two or three decades ago when it was merely phone calls. Today there are a number of different channels, which has greatly increased the complexity of handling the work at contact centers. Work can come in through many different channels: external, internal, automated, and transferred. So, the challenge for planners is to capture accurate demand across every source and every channel. This is easily possible through salesforce service cloud workforce management, through dynamic, intelligent, and continuous forecasting, planning, and gap analysis.

Factor 2: The Capacity Plan

What is a capacity plan?

A capacity plan calculates the number of agents required to meet the expected work volume and desired service level.

The details of forecasted work can be fed again into the Salesforce workforce management tool in order to generate an effective capacity plan. For this plan to work, planners need insights like expected work volumes, agent interactions across channels, bot-based interactions, transfers between agents and bots, escalation between different agents, and information from other channels like emails, text messages, social media tags.

salesforce service cloud workforce management software also allows planners to connect this plan with the company’s regulations. This includes the business rules and policies, compliance with maximum/minimum working hours etc. 

Factor 3: The Experts

The third element of workforce management is the experts. Workforce management system salesforce enables managers to assign experts to jobs as per their skill levels and work requirements. In order to deliver a smooth and pleasurable customer experience, assigning the right person for the right job is truly essential.

Once the experts to execute the capacity plan has been mapped out the next step is to use the right routing rules and solutions to assign those experts to incoming work. And here the triangle of connected workforce planning is concluded, with all the tools available within the salesforce workforce management tool. 

Tools Offered by Salesforce Workforce Engagement Management 

Managers can use different tools & features available in Salesforce Workforce Management to manage the schedules of the workforce, it includes:

Time Clock:

The time clock is used to track and record the working hours and off hours of the workforce. This tool gives immense visibility to both managers and employees about their strengths and weaknesses when they are overworked or underutilized. This information and its visibility across the team can make employees more productive, accountable, and self-directed. 

Shift Scheduling:

Shift scheduling is a smart tool embedded within the Salesforce Workforce Management that considers all available resources, their skillsets, and their working hour constraints and jots down a shift-wise plan to ensure all expertise related to the forecasted work plans is available at the right times.

PTO Tracking:

Through PTO Tracking managers can manage the leaves of their workforce, employees can submit their leaves on this portal, and managers can approve or reject them. Inputs from this tracker then go back to the shift schedular which considers the planned leaves of all employees before assigning them any work shifts.

Enhancing Customer Service Skills with Salesforce Workforce Management

Apart from the whole process of planning and execution of work at contact centers, what lies at the heart of pleasurable customer experience are the skills of employees facilitating them. The whole triangle of work, plan, and experts are secondary, while the primary force at the center of this triangle that makes it all work together is the skills. There’s a constant need to upgrade and polish the skills of experts and new joiners in every workforce. Real-time micro coaching is the answer provided by Salesforce Workforce Management through which employees can continuously work to improve their current skills and acquire new skills.

The Final Verdict:

Salesforce workforce management helps businesses to deliver exceptional services by routing work to the best-skilled agents at precisely the right time via intelligent forecasts, capacity plans, micro coaching, and in-built training of the workforce. It works both ways, keeping the customers and the employees happy, which then ultimately results in higher sales and profits for any business.