Go BackAre you making the most of the Workforce Optimisation opportunity?
Sabio's Founding Director Adam Faulkner suggests that while organisations have already seen some very positive results from the implementation of individual Workforce Optimisation (WFO) tools such as Workforce Management, Quality Monitoring and Recording, the real WFO benefits will come when a business starts to integrate different WFO software solutions to create truly optimised contact centre operations.
Workforce Optimisation represents the convergence of seven key contact centre processes that work together to support a broader customer service strategy, from innovative new solutions such as Customer Feedback and Speech Analytics, to more established technologies including Workforce Management, Performance Management, eLearning, Interaction Recording and Quality Monitoring.
Traditional contact centre management environments deploy point solutions to support dedicated specialist business teams carrying out activities such as scheduling, quality and training. Normally these applications carry out a specific function - WFM helps a business to optimise its agent resource levels to minimise under and over staffing. However, WFM doesn't address that same agent's performance development, the quality and effectiveness of their interactions, their training requirements or the customer's perception of how an agent or a company are actually performing.
Today's best practice Workforce Optimisation solutions integrate a number of these different WFO tools and processes to address all these areas - and increasingly more - to help establish and manage the optimum balance between customer satisfaction, productivity, employee welfare and revenue generation. We believe the seven key elements of a successful WFO strategy are Customer Feedback, Speech Analytics, Workforce Management, Performance Management, eLearning, Interaction Recording and Quality Monitoring.
However, today's leading Workforce Optimisation solutions offer a major step forward by taking advantage of the inherent linkages between different WFO components, helping contact centre management to get from 'what to why' as quickly as possible. A key factor here is what seems like the inevitable consolidation of different WFO components as software vendors combine to create larger organisations with the scale to support an enterprise's complete workforce optimisation requirements.
For businesses this potentially has a lot of benefits, unlocking Total Cost of Ownership savings through the need for less servers and maintenance and significantly reduced WFO management overheads. However, the significant gains are related more to the benefits that can come through the integration of inter-related WFO processes.
WFO integration in the real world
A simple example would be a Team Leader identifying a performance issue with an agent. With an integrated WFO approach, they could immediately replay calls associated with the skill in question, assess quality and assign corrective training - all from one system with the same user interface and the same underlying customer and staff data. In addition, the Team Leader could identify an agent's inadherence to schedule, and instantly live monitor their screen and telephone calls from the same user interface, ensuring that they can provide coaching or support as required.
The value of joining up these different WFO components comes from being able to use the information gathered to fine tune contact centre performance. You're not just recording calls or scheduling agents, you can actually get to the stage where WFO information becomes a key source of performance analysis, helping your business to optimise customer service processes, uncover business trends and even find out the root cause of agent and customer behaviour.
Workforce Optimisation solutions and processes excite Contact Centre and Customer Service management because they allow the business to move away from internally-focused, effort-based management and concentrate instead on external outcome-based exception reporting.
A single, integrated process cycle
At Sabio we see WFO as a single, integrated process cycle that starts with Interaction Recording, leads to Quality Monitoring and eLearning, uses Workforce Management techniques and Performance Management skills to optimise performance, and then takes advantage of solutions such as Speech Analysis and Customer Feedback to help capture the voice of the customer. It's also a continuous cycle, because this customer feedback is then fed back into the process for renewed performance improvement.
- Customer Feedback - customer-driven intelligence captured in real time offers the ability to change behaviour to exploit an opportunity or minimise negative impact
- Speech Analytics - the introduction of the latest phonetic-based and large vocabulary audio mining solutions have made this technology much more accessible, using speech recognition tools to unlock information stored in recorded interactions
- Workforce Management - drives efficiency and adherence, helps in planning, and facilitates optimum staffing and service levels
- Performance Management - provides Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that help identify staff strengths, areas for improvement and trends
- eLearning - enables the rapid delivery of best practice training and learning techniques to support staff development
- Interaction Recording - the necessity to capture and manage interactions has never been greater - Interaction Recording captures, tags, stores and retrieves customer contacts across a range of channels
- Quality Monitoring - provides the automated capture of agent voice/screen data, allowing supervisors to spend more time productively coaching and supporting their agents
Capturing the voice of the customer
Real-time Customer Feedback completes the picture. Many organisations monitor their interactions, but only from an internal quality perspective - which means they have no real way of capturing how their customers actually feel. Research consistently shows that there's a big disconnect between how well an organisation thinks they're doing and what its customers really think.
By capturing the voice of the customer and using dynamic survey techniques to deliver immediate feedback, organisations can identify what excellent customer service looks like from their perspective, and then use their internal WFO processes and tools to measure against and improve that customer perception. It's this kind of integrated WFO approach that can really help organisations to make a difference, and start to take the guesswork out of key service issues such as a customer's propensity to churn.
The good news is that while fully integrated WFO is complex, it's not something you necessarily have to do all in one go. The leading WFO solutions are now modular, and consequently allow organisations to adopt a phased approach. It's also important to remember that Workforce Optimisation isn't just software, it's a collection of inter-related processes that are only supported by technology.
Sabio is an innovative contact centre services company focused on delivering exceptional customer contact strategies and solutions. Sabio offers business consulting, systems integration and managed services and has worked with many major organisations including egg, Enterprise Rent-a-car, ING Lease, Newport City Council, Leeds City Council, Pitney Bowes, Scottish Widows, Sky, Student Loans, Travelex and Yorkshire Building Society.
Visit www.sabio.co.uk for more information
