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Overview of Workforce Management

Applies to: Dynamics 365 Contact Center—embedded, Dynamics 365 Contact Center—standalone, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Workforce Management in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center helps organizations forecast customer demand, plan staffing requirements, schedule representatives, and monitor schedule adherence from a unified experience.

By combining forecasting, capacity planning, scheduling, and real-time monitoring capabilities, Workforce Management helps supervisors align staffing levels with expected workload and maintain consistent customer service delivery.

As part of Workforce Engagement Management, Workforce Management provides capabilities that help organizations align staffing and scheduling with business demand while improving the representative experience. Workforce Engagement Management also includes quality management, which helps you evaluate and improve the quality of service interactions.

Workforce Management supports the complete workforce planning lifecycle, from forecasting future customer demand to monitoring schedule adherence in real time. These capabilities help organizations improve operational efficiency, optimize staffing, and provide representatives with greater visibility into their schedules.

Benefits

Workforce Management provides the following benefits:

  • Reduce overstaffing and understaffing by using historical data and AI-assisted forecasting to predict future workload demand.
  • Improve service levels by aligning staffing plans with forecasted interaction volumes across channels and queues.
  • Increase scheduling efficiency through automated scheduling and break distribution capabilities.
  • Give customer service representatives visibility into schedules and self-service tools for managing time off and shift changes.
  • Monitor schedule adherence in real time and respond quickly to staffing gaps that might affect customer experience.
  • Support staffing and monitoring workflows that can include both service representatives and AI agents in contact center operations.
  • Manage forecasting, planning, scheduling, and adherence tracking from a unified workforce management experience.

Workforce Management capabilities

Workforce Management includes capabilities across the workforce planning lifecycle.

Forecast demand

Forecasting helps supervisors predict future workload demand by using historical customer interaction data.

Forecasting capabilities include:

  • Creating short-term and long-term forecast scenarios.
  • Using AI-assisted forecasting models.
  • Analyzing forecasts by channel and queue.
  • Importing external historical data for forecasting scenarios.

Learn more in the following articles:

Plan staffing capacity

Capacity planning converts forecasted workload demand into staffing requirements.

Supervisors can use the following capabilities:

  • Create capacity plans linked to forecast scenarios.
  • Define service-level and response-time targets.
  • Account for factors such as shrinkage and concurrency.
  • Analyze staffing requirements by date range, channel, and queue.

Learn more in Create and manage capacity planning.

Schedule representatives

Scheduling capabilities help supervisors create and maintain workforce schedules.

Scheduling capabilities include:

  • Shift plan creation and management
  • Manual scheduling
  • Automated scheduling
  • Skills-based and queue-based workforce assignment

Learn more in the following articles:

Enable representative self-service

Representatives can manage their schedules through self-service experiences that help them stay informed and maintain schedule flexibility.

Representative self-service includes the following capabilities:

  • Viewing schedules through a personal calendar
  • Submitting time-off requests
  • Participating in shift bidding
  • Requesting intraday shift changes, such as shift swaps with eligible peers
  • Recording work time to help maintain accurate schedule and activity tracking

Learn more in the following articles:

Manage workforce requests

Supervisors can review and take action on workforce requests, including time-off requests and schedule-related activities, while maintaining staffing coverage.

Learn more in View and take action on time-off requests.

Monitor schedule adherence

Real-time adherence tracking helps supervisors understand whether representatives are following scheduled activities and identify potential coverage problems.

Adherence monitoring includes the following capabilities:

  • Representative schedule views
  • Timeline-based adherence tracking
  • Team-level adherence metrics
  • Real-time visibility into schedule deviations

Learn more in Use the Adherence Tracker.

Workforce Management roles

The following roles commonly use Workforce Management capabilities.

Role Responsibilities
Supervisor Forecast demand, create capacity plans, manage schedules, review workforce requests, and monitor adherence.
Customer service representative View schedules, request time off, participate in shift bidding, swap shifts, and track upcoming work assignments.

Workforce Management workflow

A typical Workforce Management workflow includes the following steps:

  1. Forecast customer demand using historical interaction data.
  2. Create capacity plans to determine staffing requirements.
  3. Build shift plans based on forecasted demand and staffing needs.
  4. Schedule representatives manually or automatically.
  5. Publish schedules and notify representatives.
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