r/workforcemanagement

Hey y'all!

Got a small business here in Dallas that's growing pretty fast and starting to get more after-hours inquiries about openings.

I'm debating hiring someone offshore from the Philippines to handle these after hours calls, or just getting an AI receptionist to handle it.

For context: we're getting about 10-15 after hours calls each day (usually from 5pm-9pm or 6am-8am). It's a big enough problem where it's a pain in the butt to return the calls each day. We're getting backed up and I'm worried we're missing out on deals where our competitors are picking up the phones and answering while we're not.

I've talked with some people who use overseas help and for the most part they're happy with it. Just takes time to train them up (which I'm not excited about) and I'm not sure whether my customers would prefer to talk to AI or someone overseas?

Feel like an AI receptionist will be better in the long term from a cost savings standpoint, but worried about the setup being a hassle. Just need something that can book appointments and answer basic customer questions. For the AI receptionist options, I'm looking at Nextiva, Dialpad, and Smith ai.

Is anyone using either of these approaches? If you are, would love to hear what your experience has been like and who you're using.

Thanks!

What do you guys typically do with AI in your day to day operations?

Mine is mostly automation and transformation. As well as reporting and forecasting.

Where's the the breaking point for managers in charge of shift-based teams? We're around 130 employees on different roles and creating the schedule isn't even the worst part anymore, it is everything around it. Change in availability, multiple people requesting off on the same day, someone calling in sick, and a substitute who does not have the right skills for the role.

By the time the schedule is finally done, part of it have been rebuilt through texts, calls, and messages. We've tried spreadsheets, group chats, and having relatively fixed schedules. but none really solves the issue when coordinating 130 people. If running 100-200 shift workers, do you build schedules manually or automated scheduling? Interested in manufacturing, retail, hospitality or logistics where you can’t simply put any available person into any shift.

I build scheduling software (ClockOut), so read this with that bias in mind. A few weeks ago someone posted here about hand-building monthly schedules for a 15-person healthcare group rotating through hospital positions. The hard requirement wasn't generating the schedule. It was keeping a running tally of how many times each person had done each rotation, and keeping that count close to equal month after month, while still honoring individual requests.

That reframed something for us. Most scheduling tools (ours included, until recently) treat each schedule as a standalone puzzle: fill the slots, respect availability, done. But fairness isn't a property of one schedule. It's a property of the history. You can publish a perfectly reasonable week where Maria gets the bad station again for the fourth time this month, and the tool sees nothing wrong because it doesn't remember the first three.

Once you see it that way, a few things follow:

- The tally has to be visible. If people can see the counts, "why am I always on register" conversations turn from grievance into arithmetic. Half the resentment around scheduling is really uncertainty about whether it's fair, not actual unfairness.

- Requests need to be first-class, not texts. A "prefer" or "avoid" request that lives in a group chat is invisible to whoever builds next month's schedule. If it's recorded against the schedule, honoring it and rebalancing afterward becomes mechanical.

- Qualification limits fairness. In any skilled team, the rotation can only be equalized among people actually qualified for the position, which means the qualification data has to live in the same system as the schedule or the "fair" assignment is wrong.

We ended up building this (positions on shifts, a trailing rotation tally, request workflow, and the auto-scheduler biased toward whoever has the lowest count). Not linking anything since that's not the point of the post.

The question I'd genuinely like this sub's take on: for those of you running rotations by hand, what's your fairness window? Do you try to equalize within the month, the quarter, or "eventually"? And do your people actually care about equal counts, or more about specific stations they hate?

I built a platform that analyzes historical interactions and develops FTE demand forecasts and plans. I’m looking for someone interested in testing the platform to help me improve it.

Platform functionality and capabilities:
- build multiple scenarios
- predict FTE required to hit SLAs
- forecast baseline and surge interactions
- multi-channel, shared FTEs, concurrency
- AI triage channel

If you’re interested, let me know!