Workforce Management Featured Article
How to Succeed with Workforce Management Tools
The health and productivity of the workforce are essential to the success of the contact center manager. Tools put in place to enhance productivity are often focused on the way contact center agents deliver the customer experience. If the workforce has what it needs to promote key initiatives, make customers happy and hit performance expectations, they tend to be happier in their jobs. This is where workforce management makes the biggest impact.
Managers in the contact center environment tend to have specific goals, such as improving the customer experience, delivering better customer care, improving productivity, lowering costs, driving employee motivation and keeping all transactions transparent. These goals can contribute to a positive bottom line, but managers have to have the right tools in place to ensure realization without micromanagement.
Monet Software recently posted a blog that focused on the importance of workforce management and how these tools, while critical, cannot produce the desired results alone. Such platforms are designed to make contact center goals more attainable by providing contact center managers and supervisors with key insights and an improved plan based on calling patterns and other events that can impact performance.
In terms of improved customer service, workforce management contributes to the accurate forecasting of call volume based on historical data and ACD integration. It is also used to create flexible schedules that will incorporate known and unknown variables, agent exceptions, intra-day changes to forecasts and schedules, and performance management reports. Customer service improves when forecasting and scheduling are done correctly.
Workforce management also enables the use of call routing so that agents with specific skills are available to take the calls that best fit their qualifications. This helps to improve customer satisfaction when a customer doesn’t have to be shuffled around to multiple agents before they receive the assistance they really need. Plus, agents feel their skills are put to good use, boosting motivation.
Employees also stay more motivated toward success on the job when schedules are optimized according to their availability and the needs of the center. No agent likes to sit around in a cubicle with nothing to do. Likewise, agents don’t like to have to calm the frustrated customer on the other end of the line because there aren’t enough agents staffed to handle the call volume. When the right number of agents is scheduled for a specific shift, satisfaction improves.
At the same time, when productivity is enhanced through simple steps, supervisors help to produce the expected performance levels. Workforce management solutions help to create data on call answer times, transfer rates, first call resolutions and other key metrics that ensure consistent productivity. With these tools at their fingertips, they can’t help but succeed.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi