Exhibit 131 — In re Bank of America California Unemployment Benefits Litigation (Dkt. 324-134, S.D. Cal. No. 3:21-md-02992)

Record facts

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California · No. 3:21-md-02992-GPC-MSB · Doc. 324-134 · 2024-08-29 · Docket on CourtListener

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Exhibit 131 
Case 3:21-md-02992-GPC-MSB     Document 324-134     Filed 08/29/24     PageID.7186 
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The 2023 US Contact Center 
Decision-Makers’ Guide
Sponsored by
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30 
MULTICHANNEL WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT 
Workforce management (WFM) is core to any workforce optimization suite. The technology has evolved 
into a sophisticated tool for forecasting interactions across multiple channels and for scheduling, based 
on agent skill-sets and location. Superior WFMs tool react automatically, in near-real-time, to allocate 
resources where they are needed most. 
Recent years have seen a resurgence in investment in workforce management solutions, often driven by 
the need to handle ever-growing volumes of digital interactions, as well as a rise in remote work and 
employees’ expectations for more flexible working patterns. 
Acknowledging that the customer journey is not restricted to contact centers. Vendors and 
organizations are extending WFM capabilities to the back office, branches and the mobile workforce. 
Workforce management solutions have to deal with much more complex environments in order to cope 
with the nature of the work being presented to agents. All agents require good listening abilities, 
keyboard and IT skills and a knowledge of the business they are working in. However, more now need 
additional in-depth and specific skills in order to satisfy customers, including: 
• 
Familiarity with either specific customers (e.g. account management) or customer sub-sets (e.g. 
commercial vs. domestic products) 
• 
Specific product or technical knowledge 
• 
An appropriate level of experience and empowerment for the customer (e.g. “gold-card” 
customers may demand single-call resolution, meaning senior agents should be available to take 
the call) 
• 
Language skills (both in domestic and international markets) 
• 
Ability to deal with multichannel interactions (either in real-time – such as web chats – or 
offline, such as emails). 
Fulfilling service levels while managing costs is an iterative cycle, requiring several key processes to be 
completed. Feedback from each stage allows the enterprise to continually improve its efficiency and 
become more confident in future predictions. 
The modern contact center not only requires the basics (having enough people to answer interactions in 
a reasonable amount of time), but also more sophisticated functionality such as the ability to forecast 
and schedule agents in near-real time and handle virtual contact centers, mobile resources and home-
working resources.  
Additionally, contact center managers need to allocate staff resources accurately across both digital and 
voice interactions and understand how voicebots and chatbots impact live agent interactions, including 
back office and other relevant scheduling activities. 
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31 
FORECASTING 
Before any staff planning can be done, an enterprise first needs to understand what has happened in 
the past. A solution which provides historical data from entire customer contacts including those across 
multiple channels means that scheduling can take place in a more realistic way. Enterprises should also 
be able to factor in exceptions such as advertising campaigns, training and public holidays, view when 
the best time for a meeting or training session will be, and measure the impact on the rest of the 
contact center. Running regular hypothetical 'what-if' scenarios can show a scheduler how alterations to 
shift-patterns would impact performance.  
A great deal of unnecessary agent work can be removed by identifying the types of calls that are being 
received, and determining whether these could be reduced further up the line, in the departments 
whose work actively affects the volume and type of calls received, e.g. marketing or IT (for the website), 
or through the use of bots to handle relatively simple enquiries. As such, workforce management is 
often used as part of an overall workforce optimization suite, which can include quality monitoring, 
interaction analytics, HR management and training as well as the traditional workforce management 
roles of forecasting and scheduling, as all of these factors affect each other.  
For example, understanding when and how other departments will be operating means that workforce 
management tools can be used to forecast and schedule accordingly (e.g. a new TV advert may trigger a 
wave of specific calls). Additionally, contact center management is able to brief agents – via a desktop 
broadcast or smartphone alert at short notice – about the correct responses and issues, as well as 
changing IVR prompts and messages to provide answers to the simpler questions and managing agent 
skill-sets for relevant call groups.  
Businesses should look for flexibility in forecasting functionality: situations can develop very quickly 
which mean that forecasts can become useless without the ability to alter schedules dynamically at an 
intraday level to reflect reality. (Intraday is considered in more depth later in this report). As around 25% 
of a typical contact center’s activity is now through digital channels, a demonstrable and sophisticated 
understanding of email, chat and social media volumes is critical in a solution. 
Resource planning applications, which typically look at requirements over a longer term than the typical 
WFM solution, should also be considered within the forecasting functionality. Understanding how the 
business will change some months in advance – perhaps for seasonal reasons, or with the launch of a 
new product – will certainly impact on resourcing, and close communication and integration between 
resource planning and day-to-day WFM is desirable. 
  
 
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