Step by Step: How World-Class Contact Centers Achieve Their Workforce Optimization (WFO) Goals
Today many contact centers have already implemented workforce optimization (WFO) solutions. Of those that haven’t, most are seriously researching WFO or at least giving it some consideration. Typically these organizations are satisfied with the state of their call delivery infrastructures (PBXs, ACDs, etc.) for their contact centers.
Now management teams are turning their attention to software-based workforce optimization tools in order address critical areas including: increasing agent engagement and productivity, lowering agent turnover rates, controlling labor costs, improving customer experience and customer satisfaction ratings, and maximizing overall performance and profit margins. Global revenue from the investment in WFO technologies is projected to exceed $1 billion by the end of 2006, according to industry analyst Datamonitor.
The specific goals for workforce optimization efforts often vary greatly depending on the type of business or organization and the contact center size, type of business operations, infrastructure, etc. In addition, budget constraints often limit the scope of choice and make the purchase of high dollar one-size-fits-all WFO suites impractical for all but the largest contact centers. As a result, many contact center operations have been forced to due without.
Modular Approach Widens Access to Best-of-Breed Solutions
New modular workforce optimization suites are changing the playing field. Usually consisting of six components (call recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, performance management, speech analytics and agent coaching), this approach gives organizations the freedom and flexibility to build their ideal workforce optimization solution at their own pace. You choose the best-of-breed solutions you need and then add additional tools as you grow and evolve. In this way contact centers can benefit from rapid deployment and stronger ROI, since you are only paying for tools you need and will use and benefit from immediately.
The Initial Building Blocks
Workforce management and call recording solutions are already in use by most successful contact centers. These tools are the foundation for any workforce optimization solution. A workforce management system provides the ability for organizations to forecast workloads, schedule staff (and other resources if needed) to achieve the desired service level while operating as efficiently as possible. With applications for individual contact centers, multi-site contact centers and enterprise-wide operations, WFM solutions can and do have positive impacts, lowering costs and boosting productivity. Call recording solutions allow organizations to capture and preserve valuable customer intelligence, while aiding with compliance issues and helping minimize liability risks. This is in addition to the benefit of allowing for the quality assurance monitoring of agent-customer interactions.
Unfortunately, until recently, the effectiveness of these technologies has been hampered significantly by the high cost of integrations. Implementing a WFM system and/or call recording solution that can seamlessly integrate with an entire workforce optimization suite offers significant benefits. As an example, through the integration of WFM, real-time performance management and automated agent coaching tools, organizations can track agent productivity in real time, provide agents with multi-media training and gain access to valuable tools to monitor and track agent performance. The integration of these tools provides optimized agent scheduling as well as improved agent productivity, effectiveness and accountability.
Taking WFO to the Next Level
Some of the newest solution additions in area of Workforce Optimization include tools for performance management, agent coaching and mentoring and speech analytics. These technologies are revolutionizing the world of contact center operations. Performance management solutions enable analysts to collect contact center data and share real-time performance and historical metrics with agents, supervisors and executives. Agent coaching/mentoring applications can automatically deliver training content to under-performing agents. This training content can take many forms: video courses, quizzes, educational tips, training flashes, pre-shift announcements and bulletins. Managers can choose to deliver this multi-media training/mentoring to agent desktops on either a schedule or rules-driven basis. Using a speech analytics solution, organizations can garner valuable business intelligences from the recordings of agent/customer interactions. Speech recognition tools analyze conversations and identify call trends, extracting data that would be too costly and time consuming to capture using manual methods.
To Ensure Success Step by Step
Let’s say your organization would benefit from initially implementing only a workforce management solution or call recording application, or maybe performance management or agent mentoring would have greater immediate impact. As long as you purchase solutions from an integrated suite of workforce optimization applications, you shouldn’t have any interoperability issues that would impact your future options or negatively impact your ability to reach your WFO goals, and you still have the option to add additional WFO functionality as you need it rather than buying a larger bundle of applications you don’t immediately need or want.
About Pipkins
Pipkins Inc., founded in 1983, is the leading supplier of workforce management software and services to the call center industry. Its Vantage Point product enables managers to solve the complicated operational issues in today’s multi-faceted call center environment. Pipkins’ systems forecast and schedule more than 100,000 agents in over 300 locations across all industries worldwide. The company is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri.