Workforce Management Featured Article
Is It Time for a Contact Center Workforce Management Health Check?
There is a strong disconnect between how well companies think they are servicing customers and how well they actually are. Many companies are often stunned to find that their customers rate their customer experiences far lower than the company thinks they should. Often, this is a result of outdated contact center processes that were designed a long time ago to support a customer that doesn’t exist any longer.
It’s easy to get in a groove when it comes to business processes, and companies may have a hard time climbing out. Changing is expensive and inconvenient, and workers often embrace a “but we’ve always done it this way” mentality. But it’s worth it to stop and evaluate existing processes to find out if they’re still serving their original purposes. This is particularly critical in the contact center, where old and outdated systems and processes can tarnish the customer care experience quickly and in a way companies can’t recover from.
“Sometimes, bad habits or lax business practices can slowly and gradually infiltrate even the best of call centers, and the customer experience can suffer as a result,” writes Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo in a recent blog post. “When this happens, it’s time to consider a business-wide transformation that will get the contact center back on an efficient track.”
Ciarlo recommends looking to all aspects of operations, but particularly at workforce management and workforce optimization, since these tools are so critical for building the foundation of an excellent customer support experience. Today’s solutions are capable of delivering great customer interaction insights, and workforce optimization solutions should be a big part of this, he says.
“Do you have the right tools and are you utilizing those you have available to their full potential?” he asks. “These include workforce management, call recording, screen recording, quality assurance, desktop analytics and speech analytics. Is it time to upgrade current solutions or add new ones? The better a call center can utilize workforce optimization systems and other processes, the more optimized its service levels. Result? Once again, more satisfied customers.”
It’s a way to be sure that an organization is still putting customers first – something it has to achieve and not just pay lip service to if it really wants to succeed. For if the contact center’s workforce management foundation is broken, rusted or simply insufficient to support the organization, than companies are building their entire customer strategy on a flawed platform.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi