“You’re Not Understaffed. You’re Just Flying Blind”: A Conversation on Coconut Software’s Branch Workforce Management with Robert Bitten
Robert Bitten is Coconut Software’s Senior Product Manager for Branch Workforce Management (bWFM). With over a decade in the WFM industry—including time building and implementing solutions at some of the largest names in the space—he knows exactly where the old model breaks. We sat down with him to talk about what bWFM actually is, why spreadsheets can’t cut it anymore, and what Coconut Software is doing differently. Q: Let’s start with the basics. What is branch workforce management (or as we call it around here ‘bWFM’), really? A: At its core, it’s deceptively simple: Having the right number of staff, with the right skills, scheduled at the right time—to match the client demand that’s actually coming in. The key word here is “match.” Most FIs have a demand problem and a supply problem, but they’re operating them independently. Walk-ins are up, appointments are booked, tellers are getting slammed, and the branch manager is staring at a spreadsheet they built three weeks ago, trying to figure out why the floor feels chaotic. Nobody connected those two things. That’s what bWFM is supposed to do. Connect demand to supply. And when you get that right, everything downstream gets better—wait times, member experience, branch performance. Q: Why is this such a pressing issue right now? A: I’ll give you the honest version. A couple years ago, I walked into a branch to open an account. The wait was so long, I left without opening it. Then I walked into a different bank’s branch across the street with no line and opened the new account. The first bank that just lost a customer for life—not because their product was bad, but because they didn’t have the right people on the floor when I showed up. That experience is playing out across thousands of branches every day. It’s not that FIs don’t care about staffing—they do. It’s that the tools they’re using to manage it haven’t kept up. You can’t forecast demand accurately from a spreadsheet. You can’t respond to real-time changes. You can’t answer the question “do I actually need to backfill this open headcount?” when your data lives in four different places and none of them talk to each other. The pressure to get this right has never been higher. Branches are being asked to do more (like drive revenue, deliver a premium experience, justify their existence) with constrained budgets and high attrition. Manual WFM is failing at exactly the moment when FIs need it most. Q: Walk us through why manual WFM specifically breaks down. What does that failure actually look like day-to-day? A: There are two personas who feel this pain most acutely, and it’s worth talking about both. The first is the WFM admin—that is, whoever sits above the branches managing the planning side. Their world is reactive. When something happens, they scramble to make a decision, usually without solid data to back it up. They’re wrangling spreadsheets, chasing down information from silos, and still not getting to a confident answer. And the bigger the organization gets, the worse it gets. Spreadsheets break as operations grow. Compliance becomes harder. Errors multiply. The manual process literally cannot scale. The second is the branch manager. Their job is to deploy their skilled team in the most optimal way to serve the members coming in. But they have no real visibility into what’s coming. They’re scheduling based on gut feel, tribal knowledge, or a pattern they remember from last year. When someone calls in sick, they’re texting and calling people manually to find coverage. When demand spikes, they have no early warning. They’re just reacting. What’s striking is that neither of these people are doing a bad job. They’re just being asked to do something impossible with the tools they have. Q: Where does Coconut’s approach start to look different? A: It starts with the data. And this is where I think we have a genuine advantage. Unlike legacy vendors who lack this context, we have over a decade of rich data on why members visit, what they need, and what the outcomes are. We understand not just the volume of demand, but the specific skills required to meet it—whether that’s a Spanish-speaking advisor, a business banker, or a mortgage specialist. By using this deeper layer of intent and outcome data, we can build staffing models that don’t just fill seats, but actively drive better business results. A secondary, yet significant, benefit of this approach is the speed of implementation. Because we already own the demand picture, we eliminate the need for the massive, months-long integration projects that often derail traditional WFM deployments. For the teller side, we bring in transaction data via a straightforward integration with your core. But the banker’s side? We already have it. That’s a fundamentally faster path to value. Q: How does the Coconut bWFM solution actually work? What does the product do? A: We think about it as a linear process, three connected phases that move you from reactive to proactive. The first is demand forecasting. Using your historical data (appointments, walk-ins, and teller transactions) we generate daily, weekly, and monthly branch-level forecasts. Not just “here’s how many people walked in last March.” We build in seasonality and trend factors, we differentiate by service type, and we give you a view of exactly which days and hours each branch will be busiest. You can see it at the branch level, the region level, filtered by the service types that matter to you. Our early customers are seeing forecast accuracy well under 5% weighted error. The second phase is workforce recommendations. Once you have the demand forecast, the next question is: how many people do you actually need to meet it? The workforce plan translates that forecast into time-of-day headcount recommendations for both your banker and teller lines. It factors in target service levels and gives you the staffing numbers to hit those goals. And because we’re pulling from engagement data, we can go beyond headcount. We