What is WFM (Workforce Management)?
WFM (workforce management) is the practice and software of forecasting contact volume, scheduling enough agents to meet it, and tracking adherence to that schedule.
The forecast comes first: historical volume by interval, adjusted for seasonality, campaigns and known events. From that, the required staffing is calculated for each interval, usually against a service level target such as answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds.
Adherence measures whether people worked the schedule they were given. It is the metric most prone to being misused — treated as a discipline tool rather than a planning input, it produces agents who stay logged in while adding no value.
For teams under roughly fifteen agents, formal WFM software is usually overkill. The forecasting value appears when interval-level variation is large enough that a spreadsheet stops coping.
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