Workforce Management Featured Article
Preventing Customer and Agent Turnover Is Your Best Workforce Management Strategy
In the contact center, managers spend a great deal of time preventing turnover. Customer turnover, since it costs far more to acquire a new customer than please an existing one; and employee turnover, since letting go of properly trained and experienced agents will negatively affect operations. The goal, therefore, is two-pronged: how do you keep both agents AND customers in place?
The answer is “workforce management.” A properly scheduled workforce will ensure that customer support standards remain high, that the best agent is available for the call or contact, and that customers don’t have to wait too long for an agent. It also ensures that agents are overworked, which can cause stress and burnout (and turnover), or underworked, which can cause boredom and slacking (and turnover).
What Makes For the Best Workforce Management Approach?
While there are a lot of ways to approach workforce management, today’s cloud-best software is the best choice for small and medium-sized contact centers. Manual scheduling takes too much time and lacks flexibility, and premise-based software systems carry high price-tags. You’re seeking an easy, intelligent and intuitive way to stay up-to-date with the schedule and be flexible in responding to changes and challenges. If you’re not able to do this, it may be time to reassess your current workforce management strategy.
Make it multichannel. If you’re focusing only on call queues, then your other contact channels are probably suffering because of it. Customers like to choose how they contact you today, which means that web chat and email must be forecast and scheduled exactly how you would manage phone calls.
Look for cloud-based solutions. Cloud-based WFM software puts call centers in the driver’s seat and offers unprecedented control, enabling dramatic cost savings by eliminating infrastructure costs and building better schedules with better forecasting. Additionally, call centers can pay for only what they need.
Control the metrics that matter the most. One of the primary factors for burning out both agents AND customers are complex calls that require multiple transfers. Calls that started out basic turn into problematic exchanges because of logistics. When you formulate your new workforce management strategy, consider giving agents more autonomy to solve the customer problems in a single contact. Coupled with effective workforce management to ensure that there are always enough agents to handle the call/contact load, this can go a long way toward preventing customer churn and agent burnout.
A good workforce management solution can boost the accuracy of your forecasting and scheduling, ensuring that you always have the right resources at the right time for your customers as well as your agents.
Edited by Maurice Nagle