Workforce Management Featured Article

Centralized Administration of Workforce Optimization Helps Unify the Contact Center Function

The contact center of any organization has a lot of potential. It can help improve customer relationships, win over new customers, please and retain existing customers and even win back former customers. It can cross-sell and upsell, and it can build brand awareness. In addition, it can reach out on social media and find customers where they live, and can be a responsive, nurturing force for any brand to spread its message.

Unfortunately, reality often intrudes and the contact center frequently serves as a line of sand-bags: the last defense against the flood. High call volume not foreseen by managers can wreak havoc on service goals, and poorly trained agents put on the phone too soon can damage customer relationships.

Modern workforce optimization (WFO) solutions are designed to turn the contact center from an emergency bulwark against disaster to a proactive selling organization that can be a financial boon to a company. For organizations still using spreadsheets to build schedules, however, the higher goal may remain a pipe dream, particularly if an organization is offering customer support from multiple sites or departments.

The video below, produced by workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software, recounts the ways that modern call center managers can improve over the traditional spreadsheet methods and use call volume and history to create accurate forecasts and schedules that help make the contact center are more useful tool to organizations. Managers can keep an eye on key performance indicators and service levels, receive alerts when thresholds are reached and make changes on-the-fly to adjust to the day’s call and contact volume realities.

The type of insight a modern cloud-based workforce optimization solution can reveal may turn the contact center on its ear. Tried-and-true practices can be discovered to be inefficient, and changes that will save money and boost the quality of the customer experience may be found in less-than-obvious places. But where cloud-based workforce optimization can come in extra handy is in organizations with multiple sites or multiple departments that all have a stake in offering the best possible customer experience, according to Monet’s Chuck Ciarlo.

“Rather than take a siloed approach, where each system works independently without reciprocal operation with other divisions, WFO can provide easy access to cross-functional data that helps align teams, so they can work more effectively on common objectives,” writes Ciarlo. “And access is immediate regardless of employee location, just one of the many benefits of a cloud delivery system.”

Cloud-based WFO offers centralized administration that can help keep operations smooth and standards high across multiple sites and departments. They eliminate the need for expensive and time-consuming integration and deliver important call center insights, metrics and alerts on an ongoing basis and without being limited by geographic location.

For today’s increasingly complex contact center function, this is a benefit that cannot be ignored.