Workforce Management Featured Article
Contact Center Workforce Management Goes Mobile
Mobile devices are have become a permanent fixture in workplaces today, whether for good or for ill. Companies wary that employees are wasting time on mobile devices or are using company property for personal reasons can take comfort in the fact that a more mobile workforce is generally a more efficient and productive workforce.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a strong component of today’s workforce. Employees are using their own smartphones and tablets to engage in work activities, and this has had a lot of benefits for companies. Employees are easier to keep track of, easier to reach and better able to multitask (answer an e-mail during a break from a day-long meeting, for example).
Aside from communications such as phone and e-mail, mobility also presents both opportunities and challenges to other enterprise functions, including workforce management, according to a recent blog post by Pankaj Narang for Infoshore.
“Planning becomes easier and more streamlined with a mobile workforce management solution,” writes Narang. “Whereas managers usually have to work using spreadsheets and meetings, task tracking tools improves employee workflow and project management. Task management also solves time management and project completion since all work-related tasks are automated.”
In the modern contact center, not all human resources are attached to a desk via a headset. Omnichannel customer support often means brining in personnel from other departments, such as marketing and sales, social media monitoring, billing, fulfillment and other back-office functions. Mobile workforce management can enable these people to be part of the broader contact center regardless of where they are located. For customer support personnel who are on the road – think home service or repair personnel – mobile workforce management can even offer companies the ability to make sure employees are where they are supposed to be at all times, and to make sure they’re taking the best possible routes to arrive at customers’ homes or other locations.
In addition, it can offer broader visibility to contact center based staff, who can use mobile features of a workforce management solution to check their schedules from wherever they happen to be, and engage in automated tasks such as schedule swapping and time-off requests.
The trick to success, however, is to balance the benefits of mobile workforce management without making it seem to employees that Big Brother is tracking them, says Narang.
“Before you start looking for and screening mobile device management companies, there is one aspect you need to plan first,” Narang writes. “Using a task tracking app can raise a few ethical objections, especially since your employees will feel as if you’re watching them all the time. For that, you need to discuss a few aspects with your HR personnel and decide what your next step will be.”
For the modern omnichannel contact center, however, these are small hurdles to overcome when success with a mobile workforce management program can have so many positive implications on agents, operations and the bottom line.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi