Workforce Management Featured Article
Support the Empowered Call Center Workforce with Empowered Workforce Management
The call center today is a different beast than it once was. For starters, it’s a more complex organization. It handles multiple channels and communications media, multiple product or services lines and more skills than ever dreamed of before. It operates across continents and time zones, and may employ agents scattered all over the world in one unified customer support organization.
The benefits are many. One article by writer and call center expert Nick Mylum, notes how today’s technologies have better empowered the call center and its agents, which benefits the quality of customer service. It also benefits agent retention, he says, since call center agents today are far more skilled and professional than they once were.
“Now, contact centers are able to provide a truly personalized customer service offering to customers on behalf of brands across multiple channels,” writes Mylum. “This joined up and unified approach has hugely positive ramifications on the motivation and retention of our ambitious and highly-skilled staff.”
The job of a call center agent – once simply to answer phones – is more complex, more nuanced, more interesting and, in the end, more satisfying, particularly when agents are empowered to take steps on their own to solve problems.
“There is a tremendous sense of purpose that is now felt by many contact center staff when it comes to tracking and resolving an end-to-end customer enquiry,” writes Mylum. “Employees have never been so empowered and this helps them to feel a real sense of purpose in their work, and helps with motivation on a daily basis. With post-call or customer satisfaction scores driving instant feedback, the satisfaction of knowing a job has been done well has never been felt so readily as it is now for contact center staff.”
Of course, while the more complex and empowered call center can improve both agent job satisfaction and customer service quality, it can present complications in management, particularly from a workforce management perspective. Call center scheduling, once accomplished on graph paper, is now both an art and a science, and few multichannel contact centers can hope to build quality schedules without advanced workforce management.
Today’s workforce management solutions, which are cloud-based, allowing agents to work remotely or even from home, can address the multichannel, multi-skilled nature of today’s call center business with ease. They allow call centers to include all media channels in both the forecast and the schedule, which helps improve accuracy, and track intra-day trends so managers can make immediate adjustments on-the-fly to ensure that adherence and service levels are maintained.
Schedule changes based on unforeseen circumstances do not require a complete manual rework of the schedule; the modern workforce management solution makes it easy to customize the schedule to match real needs, rather than theoretical needs based on forecasts or guesses.
While it’s beyond argument that the call center has changed, for many companies, the workforce management hasn’t. This has stymied contact center growth for many organizations, putting a yoke on empowered agents and limiting them to the twentieth-century “business as usual.” Companies implementing modern workforce management solutions will find that they pay for themselves very quickly by allowing business to grow.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi