Workforce Management Featured Article
Yesterday's Workforce Optimization Told You Where You Went Wrong. Today's Tells You When You Are Going Wrong
Workforce optimization is critical to the operation of your contact center. It helps you understand who you need on staff, doing what, via what channels, at the right time. It helps you create a dynamic schedule that’s as close a match as possible to your real needs. It warns you when things are out of alignment and quality is about to suffer. Ultimately, it helps you increase the chances of a successful customer engagement. But it can do a lot more than that.
To work properly, of course, your workforce optimization solutions requires data, and a lot of it. Many of today’s solutions have data and speech analytics capabilities that can give contact center managers unique insight into operations and ideas regarding how to improve. While previous iterations of workforce management solutions generated data, it came too late to help the contact center right in this moment, according to a recent blog post by Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert).
“What good is data if you get it when it’s too late to use it?” asked Ciarlo. “Sure you can still make changes to affect future performance, but how much better would it be to deliver real-time guidance to agents, and alert managers when a call is going south? There is a predictive quality to this data, but if it’s compiled correctly you’ll be able to anticipate customer intentions and deliver a more customized response. It also works for online chat and email engagements.”
In other words, while it’s great to know what you did wrong, it’s more helpful to understand what you’re doing wrong right at this moment. Customers are not a uniform group: every customer has different needs and preferences, and the journey from first contact to first contact resolution is always going to be a little bit different. With more data presented in a way that’s useful – and more importantly, in real-time – you can help the customer take a better journey in this transaction instead of next time he calls.
It’s also important to stand that while workforce optimization can generate a lot of data, you don’t need to see all of it at once. That could simply cause confusion and “data overload.”
“There is data you’ll want to see after the fact, and data that’s important right now,” wrote Ciarlo. “When deploying analytics, make it easier for agents and managers to see what they need to see, when they need to see it. This may require some customization of your WFM solution, or simply bringing your system more in line with your business goals.”
Your workforce optimization solution won’t be able to “do it all” for you. You’ll still ultimately need input from human agents, so make sure your agents know how to use your workforce optimization solutions properly, and help them understand how the solution can help them do their jobs better and attain their own employment goals. Contact center workers will respond well to any tool that helps them build better outcomes for customers. It simply makes their jobs more pleasant.
“If you do it right, you’ll figure out where a journey is headed while it’s still near the starting point, and react accordingly so the rest of the path is a walk in the park,” wrote Ciarlo.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi