Call Recording Featured Article

While the traditional image of workforce management in the contact center is a spreadsheet-based schedule and a manager who keeps track of headcount by wandering the call center floor, sending employees on breaks at the appointed times, the idea belongs in the past. Managers, tasked with a variety of jobs, simply don’t have the time to do it all by hand and by eyesight, and the fact that contact centers are increasingly distributed across the organization, the state, the country or even the world makes it impossible.

Today’s technology can help optimize an increasingly spread out workforce, and call center managers would be wise to take advice from the managers of those whose job it is to be away from the support facility and on the road: field service personnel. According to John Cameron, general manager of Trimble (News - Alert) Field Service Management (FSM) writing for Business2Community, it’s the real-time nature of today’s workforce management that is key to operating a successful support business.

“Well-run companies know that reliable systems helps them to optimize their operations, and one such system is workforce management, which gives managers and dispatchers real-time visibility into the work schedules and activities of their field workers,” he wrote.

While few contact centers have employees as distributed as field sales personnel, today’s call center model often includes home-based agents, agents in remote offices and back-office personnel who sometimes handle customer support calls and may be located in a different department. All of them can be tied together with a good cloud-based workforce management solution, and managers can virtually monitor the workforce from anywhere, ensuring there is optimum coverage to meet the schedule.

For field service workers, exception management is critical: few forecasts ever match reality down to the last 15-minute time slot, so field sales managers must be able to adjust when inevitable delays crop up due to problems completing the job, traffic, mechanical problems or worker error occur. In the call center, exception management is important when workers call in sick, come in late, overextend their breaks and lunch, or must handle exceptionally tricky customer calls. Today’s workforce management solutions allow managers to adjust schedules and reassign work to ensure quality of service, worker productivity and – ultimately – increased productivity and customer satisfaction, according to Cameron.

“By providing greater visibility into the performance of each worker and the business as a whole, the technology allows managers to better evaluate the effectiveness of their operations,” he wrote. “Clearly, making improvements in efficiencies requires a long-term commitment, and organizations that successfully implement these improvements do so because of having the right strategy and the right technology in place.”