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 can tell you when during the week you need someone with specific skills (a Spanish-speaking advisor, a business banker, a mortgage specialist) so the right expertise is there when demand for it peaks.
The third phase is shift management. This is where you close the loop entirely. Branch managers move off Excel and into a single view where they can see workforce recommendations, their staff roster, approved time off, upcoming appointments, and HR rules—all in one place. They can create schedules to the plan, publish directly from the product, and send automatic notifications to staff when anything changes. No more calling, no more texting, no more version-control chaos.
Q: The self-learning piece is interesting. Does the model actually improve over time?
A: Yes, and it’s designed to. Each month, the model incorporates new data, continuously refining its accuracy against what actually happened at each branch. Over time, you’re not just working from a static historical picture. You’re working from a system that gets smarter about your specific branches, your specific demand patterns, your specific seasonality.
This is one of the things legacy WFM tools genuinely lack. They give you a starting point and leave it there. We want a system that improves the longer you use it!
Q: How does this fit into Coconut’s broader platform?
A: Think of it as completing a circle we’ve been building for years.
For a long time, Coconut has done the demand capture side incredibly well—appointment scheduling, lobby management, meeting execution, advisor matching. As a true suite of intelligent branch solutions, we know what members need, when they’re coming in, and who on your team is best positioned to help them. That’s the demand side.
Branch workforce management is the supply side. It takes everything we’ve already captured and says: now let’s make sure the right people are actually there to deliver on it. More successful meetings, shorter wait times, stronger branch performance. The flywheel completes.
No other WFM vendor has access to the depth of branch demand data we already have. That’s not a feature. It’s a structural advantage.
Q: For an FI that’s evaluating this, what does the implementation actually look like? Is this a big lift?
A: That’s one of the questions I get most often, and I’m always glad when it comes up—because the honest answer is: No, not compared to what you’re used to.
There’s no new vendor review. No heavy IT lift. Your managers are already in Coconut. Your appointment and walk-in data is already there. For the teller side, we work with you on a data feed from your core. It can start as a simple flat file while we work toward a tighter automated integration. But you don’t need to wire up five different systems just to get started.
Change management is also lighter than you’d expect, because the people who are going to use this are already familiar with the product. It’s another module in the system they’re already logging into.
Q: Last question: what does success actually look like for an FI that implements this?
A: A few things. First, the time savings. Branch managers and WFM admins reclaim hours every week — hours that used to go into building schedules, chasing approvals, and fixing problems after the fact. That time goes back into coaching, member relationships, value-added work.
Second, the confidence. When finance asks why you need to backfill a role, you have a data-backed answer. When a branch starts asking for more headcount, you can actually compare their recommendation to forecast demand and make an informed call. You are no longer guessing.
And lastly (this is the one I’m most excited about): You stop leaving revenue on the table. When the right advisor is in the right place when high-value demand comes in, more of those conversations happen. More loans close. More accounts open. The branch becomes a place where member experience and business performance reinforce each other, instead of competing.
That’s what we’re building. And we think it changes the game for every FI that’s been stuck in the spreadsheet era.
Ready to see what branch workforce management looks like when it’s built on your actual data? Explore Coconut’s Branch Workforce Management solution or reach out to start a conversation.
About Us
Coconut Software is the leading AI-powered Intelligent Branch Solution for banks and credit unions seeking to boost operational efficiency, deposit growth, loan growth, cross-channel seamlessness, and competitive CSAT and NPS scores. For over a decade, we have been the market leader in bank appointment scheduling software, branch workforce management, branch data and analytics, lobby and queue management, and video banking, helping our customers achieve increased CSAT, bigger ROI, and growth across all lines of business. Get in touch with us today to learn more.