I am an IT admin who recently inherited our workforce management configuration. We are trying to automate the shift trade approval process. Currently, our supervisors have to manually review every request. I want to build a logic that automatically approves a trade if the ‘Forecasted Service Level’ for the affected interval remains above eighty percent. I see the WFM API has endpoints for shift trades, but I am not sure how to query the forecasted performance for a future date to validate the trade. Has anyone successfully automated this?
This is a complex architecture. You need to use the /api/v2/workforcemanagement/managementunits/{muId}/shifttrades/{tradeId}/match endpoint to see the impact of the trade. However, that endpoint does not give you the service level impact. You have to pull the ‘Requirement’ data for that interval using the /api/v2/workforcemanagement/managementunits/{muId}/workplanrotations and compare it to the total headcount after the trade. I have built this for several large BPOs and it requires a very robust middle tier to handle the calculations.
I am at a small company with only twenty agents and we just do this manually because the API is so intimidating. I tried to look at the documentation for the ‘Shift Trade’ objects and I got a headache. If you are a senior architect like Han40, maybe it is easy, but for a one-man shop, it is a lot of work to automate something that takes my supervisor five minutes a day.
I evaluate hundreds of interactions a week and I can tell you that automated shift trades can be a disaster for quality if you do not factor in agent proficiency. If you trade a high-performing agent for a trainee, your service level might stay at eighty percent, but your average handle time will spike and your customer satisfaction will drop. Your automation should also check the proficiency levels of the agents involved in the trade before it hits the ‘Approve’ button.