Workforce Management Featured Article
Workforce Management Will Play a Strong Role in the Contact Center of the Future
What will the contact center look like in 2020? It’s a point worth wondering about, after all, it’s less than four years away. While customers’ core wishes may remain constant through the years – fast, easy and personalized service when and where they need it – their preferences and their communications methods change regularly with the rising popularity of each new social media channel, mobile phone app or Web-based interactive shopping experience. Customers today also expect that contact centers are open and ready to help long past the usual business hours of 9 to 5 Monday through Friday.
While many companies today talk about “omnichannel” customer support, few are achieving it. It’s not because they haven’t tried, but they may lack the technology, expertise and workforce to pull it off. Traditionally, contact center agents devoted themselves to single channels, such as telephone or email. But with customers (particularly younger customers) regularly traversing channels and expecting a unified experience, it’s no longer feasible to keep agents isolated in contact channels. Managing a workforce is hard enough in today’s contact center. In the contact center of 2020, it will be virtually impossible without a robust workforce management solution that is flexible, accurate, automated and backed up by great reporting and analytics, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“Workforce management will play a more prominent role in tomorrow’s contact centers, as the drive to optimize resources will always be key to running a successful business,” wrote Ciarlo. “In the contact center, that means accurate forecasting, as well as analytics, skills-based routing and capturing important customer data.”
As the contact center of the future needs to become more flexible and cross time zones and the work becomes more demanding, many companies are meeting their omnichannel strategies by hiring a more educated and skilled profile of worker. For some organizations, this will mean reaching out to remote and home-based contact center professionals, particularly as remote working technologies improve and companies start trimming budgets by becoming spare with physical work premises. With remote workers, it’s even more important to ensure they’re parts of the overall contact center entity by using a collaborative and intelligent workforce management solution.
“As workforce patterns change, and more employees opt for flexible scheduling to balance their jobs with their personal responsibilities, WFM will have to keep up with even more accurate resource planning, and by making it easier for agents to bid on shifts in a way that does not negatively impact customer service,” wrote Ciarlo.
Contact center managers are already busy and overwhelmed, and most wear a number of hats. It’s important that their most important jobs – ensuring a great customer experience and managing and coaching agents – not be eclipsed by old-fashioned manual processes that are time-consuming and inaccurate. By preparing now for the changes to come, your contact center can get ahead of the technology curve, and provide better customer service than other companies in your industry.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi