Your Guide to Better WFM
[White Paper] Workforce Engagement
In our free white paper, you'll learn about workforce engagement technologies and how to enhance the customer experience through advanced analytics and WFM tools.
Traditional workforce management (WFM) involves spreadsheets and manual time recording, which are onerous processes that decrease customer satisfaction. Contact Center Managers need a way to schedule people optimally, when the work is available for them to complete. This complexity of the randomness of work coming in, combined with the needs of the individuals completing the work, leads us to the need for more advanced solutions for scheduling.
Today, forward-thinking managers are adopting a smarter, more streamlined approach to satisfy employees, which helps provide a better customer experience (CX). By better scheduling employees with WFM solutions, the center will be optimized as the work will be handled with the right amount of employees at that time. Many times, we see the exception to this on both sides…agents sitting around waiting for work, or so overworked that they quit.
Workforce engagement is a key driver of customer satisfaction. In fact, studies show that happier employees provide better customer experiences. However, it can be difficult to satisfy your customers when using traditional WFM processes.
With any manual process, your organization may be spending too much time scheduling agents at the wrong time. What’s worse, by estimating anticipated workload and call volumes, you may be more likely to over- or under-schedule your employees, leading to both employee and customer dissatisfaction.
To best prepare for unexpected events, such as unscheduled time off or high work volumes, managers must take a proactive approach by implementing more advanced and comprehensive management and scheduling strategies.
By using WFM applications, companies are able to accomplish the following:
The early generations of Workforce Engagement or Optimization (WFE/ WFO) stop with call recording and quality monitoring. While this provides centers with the ability to understand a sampling of what is happening in their center, how much more do we miss?
The next generation of WFE will combine real-time desktop, speech, and emotional analytics with agent-enabled workflow engines and CTI applications to help managers determine the significance of developing situations.
That’s a mouthful. What we mean is these solutions allow managers to incorporate emotional or voice analytics, which are helpful to understanding more about what is happening in real-time within the center. Additionally, it is one thing to stay informed about what is happening, but it is another when you can attach a workflow to this process that automatically alerts agents and provides suggestions for handling or kicking off other internal processes to help the customer.
Combined with CTI (screen pop), the agent is then fully aware of the situation the customer is in, and can offer help more quickly, many times without having them repeat themselves. With more advanced workforce engagement and analytics tools in place, managers will have immediate access to data that reveal the extent of issues, allowing them to respond to crises faster.
Additionally, contact center managers can proactively prepare their agents through self-paced, web-based training, known as e-learning, to ensure the highest level of customer service. E-learning creates peace of mind for managers because scheduling and understaffing issues are addressed. By working with a WFM package, training times can be scheduled so as not to affect the performance of the center.
Taking proactive measures to address issues before they emerge, managers can also ensure that their organizations comply with all call-recording requirements pertaining to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), HIPAA, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), avoiding potential penalties in the long-run. Smarter WFE systems ensure your organization complies with these regulations and has records for all of the calls in the unlikely event of an audit.
The adoption of real-time WFE capabilities will transform your ecosystem of customer experience as it exists today. Workforce Engagement systems can help your organization recognize significant situations, flag hazards and address the issues of customers who have not yet encountered problems trends before humans are able to.
It all starts with a plan. Building a proactive roadmap will ensure your organization evades future hurdles involving both internal and external stakeholders.
In our free white paper, you'll learn about workforce engagement technologies and how to enhance the customer experience through advanced analytics and WFM tools.