I recently came across an article in which the author strongly suggested that the purchase of forecasting and scheduling software ought to be at the top of a contact center’s acquisition list. You might expect me to agree. What bothers me is that the author said that workforce management ought to be purchased before nearly every other technology of interest to contact center management teams. Before quality monitoring. Before Customer Relationship Management systems. Before performance management. Before e-learning.
The author asserted that only forecasting and scheduling is able to improve service levels, reduce cost and provide the fastest return on investment through improved profitability.
I’d love to concur. But, the logical shortcoming in this argument is the insistence that the neat boundaries between applications will persist into the future. In the 1980s and 90s contact center management teams did indeed need to make purchases with some kind of priority in mind. Each application had a somewhat narrow and well-defined focus.
Forecasting and scheduling was about efficiency with respect to matching the workload with the workforce. It was and remains a tactical application that can reduce labor cost while preserving speed of answer. Quality monitoring was and remains a more strategic application that is concerned with effectiveness. It addresses issues relating to what goes on inside the transaction and the impact on customer loyalty, wallet share and the top and bottom line. Customer relationship management applications enable agents to better understand the needs of each customer and in so doing also drive revenue and profits. Performance management is an application that helps focus everyone in the center on what is truly important by providing critical feedback on key performance indicators. And, e-learning is an application that makes it possible to plug skill and knowledge gaps efficiently and effectively, enabling the center to achieve success in whatever terms that center chooses to define it.
While it may have been true in the 90s, the boundaries between these applications are blurring in the first decade of the 21 st Century. The operative word is convergence. Technologies, applications and even industries are converging at accelerating rates. This is happening not because vendors and analysts think it’s a good idea but because users really want it. In the contact center, the convergence among workforce optimization applications is the result of the quest for balance between the often-competing goals of efficiency and effectiveness coupled with a growing need to be freed from adminis-trivia.
Maintaining balance is tricky in the contact center. Being out of balance is often career ending. The fact is that all contact centers start out life unbalanced in favor of efficiency. The first technology any center obtains is an Automatic Call Distributor. Apart from its routing wizardry, ACDs produce tons of productivity data. And so from day one, contact centers tend to be biased towards efficiency. They obsess over service level and average handle time. But most center management teams eventually realize that effectiveness matters greatly. Therefore, obtaining effectiveness metrics and tools to help increase effectiveness become a priority. Centers have had to make hard choices up to now among these applications in their individual quest for balance between efficiency and effectiveness. Imbalances on either side yield sub-optimal results.
The difficult choices that contact centers face is one source for the drivers of the emerging workforce optimization market. While some view workforce optimization as simply the aggregation of discrete applications, it’s more than just the sum of its parts. Human beings are composed of mostly water and an assortment of elements and chemicals. While you can easily assemble the chemical components, if you were to mix them together you will most assuredly not produce a human being. Likewise, merely obtaining the components of workforce optimization won’t mean that you will enjoy all the benefits therein. The components need to be blended, creating synergies that reinforce and multiply the benefits available.
This is why emerging workforce optimization solutions break down the barriers among the constituent components. The first purchase priority for a center – after the ACD – should be a solution that delivers not only basic forecasting and scheduling but also delivers internal quality monitoring and basic performance management. The center achieves the critical balance between effectiveness and efficiency. In the next step, centers expand the workforce optimization solution to improve control over shrinkage, add context to the performance management scorecards and use e-learning tools to transform recorded interactions into best practice learning clips. The center stays balanced rather than veering back and forth from an efficiency solution to an effectiveness solution. The consistent message this sends to the agent team keeps them focused on doing the right things and doing them well.
It’s no longer about trying to prioritize purchases among siloed applications, it’s about implementing the appropriate level of workforce optimization consistent with your center’s culture and role in the enterprise. In the 21 st Century centers should not buy workforce management or quality monitoring. They should not buy performance management or e-learning. They should buy blended solutions with appropriate elements of all those application silos to keep their balance.
Bill Durr is Principal Solutions Consultant for Witness Systems, provider of workforce management software and services.
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