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How Engagement and Collaboration Drive Value in Workforce Optimization Software

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How Engagement and Collaboration Drive Value in Workforce Optimization Software

February 25, 2015

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By Susan J. Campbell,
TMCnet Contributing Editor
 


Years ago I was in a sales role, working with local business owners to try to outfit them with the right hardware and software to support their internal processes. Once I sold the equipment or professional services, I then relied on service and support teams to follow through on the sale for implementation before I would return for training. If service and support failed to deliver on promises I made to the customer, my return for training was not always pleasant.


In situations like these, I generally would leave a client location while making a call to the service manager to find out why a customer order was not fulfilled properly. His first line of defense was to find fault with me instead of his team, regardless of the facts. While it didn’t happen often, there was little as frustrating as a support team not supporting the sales team as without our sales, they wouldn’t have much to do.

Such thinking is often a demonstration of the separation between sales teams and other divisions within the company. It didn’t help when the sales reps were given special treatment and support staff resented them for it. As one who was in the role, sales is hard and you have to talk to a lot of people before you can close a deal and get paid. Without internal teams backing you up, it was difficult to succeed. It was definitely an environment that could have benefited from workforce optimization software.

The biggest problem, however, was not a lack of resources, but instead a lack of interdepartmental collaboration. A recent CSRwire report highlighted the importance of this type of collaboration to strengthen your brand and keep employees. The goal is to work together toward a common goal and not just what is good for a single department or employee. The example in the article was the Best Buy (News - Alert) ‘Geek Squad Academy’, and how its agents work to pull employees from their regular duties to focus on special assignments.

For an outward focus, Geek Squad Agents travel the country, giving two-day workshops to underserved teens. While the program started as a Geek Squad-only initiative, it evolved into one that would involve employees from the retail channels as well. In doing so, it provided a common goal among the agents and the retail employees, enabling them to work together on an initiative that was bigger than any of them alone and meant more than a paycheck at the end of the week.

This is really the point of workforce optimization software – to provide a way for disengaged and unmotivated employees to find a common focus on which to build. While there are business goals involved, the key idea is to engage employees so they get excited about what they’re doing and the outcomes they achieve by banding together. In doing so, they not only produce great outcomes for the brand, but also a rewarding place to work.




Edited by Rory J. Thompson
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