Managing Your Workforce Management Strategy



By Christian Szpilfogel

Over the last fifteen to twenty years, workforce management has evolved from a discipline into a technology sector, moving beyond the simple need to make contact centers more efficient in their planning and replace spreadsheets that took a full-time job to manage. Over time, workforce management has become a way to make managers more effective, allowing them to create and deliver the optimal schedules to meet customer service needs.

As the call center has grown into the more complex contact center, so have the requirements of the workforce. In fact, we now see more complex scenarios in which contact center workers must handle various media types, such as voice, text, and email, in order to serve all expected functions. Workforce management has gone from a “nice-to-have” resource for driving efficiency to a “must-have” tool to effectively staff any medium to large contact center handling customer care.

Given the personalized nature of contact center work, the strategy guiding the workforce management of the call center itself should also be personalized to the company. There are three key factors to consider in developing this strategy.

1) Focus on Customer Experience: It’s critical to understand that customer experience still drives contact center strategies today. Therefore, it’s critical to ensure that any workforce management strategy errs on the side of delivering great customer service. Being slightly overstaffed is nothing compared to missing out on customer opportunities and losing customers.

Acquiring new customers is more important today than it has ever been, as is the sensitivity to losing customers to competitors. That’s why it’s crucial to deploy a workforce management strategy that drives customer satisfaction as well as delivers efficiency and reduces costs. This means that any workforce management strategy and supporting technologies must ensure the availability of the right level of staff and the right people: those who have the skills necessary to serve customers the way they want to be served.

2) Anticipate Changes in Communications Preferences: In addition to internalizing customer service in a workforce management strategy, it’s important to anticipate the changing communications behaviors of your customer base. Today a contact center that is mostly comprised of voice conversation may be sufficient, but will that still be true two, three, or five years out?

If you’re looking at making an investment in a workforce management strategy, make sure any technology involved seamlessly interoperates with the voice component essential to today’s customer service as well as all the digital media routing into the contact center. Moreover, staff must be able to go beyond providing the service customers expect and be well versed in the media customers will prefer in the future, regardless of whether that’s voice, text, or video media. 

3) Think about Employees: Apart from minding customer service goals and customer communications preferences, it’s also imperative to think of your employees. Customer service employees are the face and the voice of your business to the customer. Who are you hiring and what do they need from you to be satisfied with their work? A satisfied employee will do a better job and will stay with the company longer. While contact center workers aren’t the highest-paid employees, tools and additional benefits can go a long way toward making them happier at work.

Workforce management plays a big part in this, making it easy to give workers some control over their own schedules and allow them to collaborate with their peers in managing time off, thus building comradery and a sense of ownership across the team. In addition, workforce management technologies also present the perfect opportunity to provide new incentives through gamification to make everyday jobs seem more interesting and to inspire the competitive spirit and passion of employees. This creates a more congenial atmosphere and drives overall performance and employee happiness.

Invest in Workforce Management Technology: When considering a workforce management technology investment, it’s crucial to look at the big picture. Workforce management systems do not operate in a vacuum. Rather, they operate in an integrated fashion within the overall contact center infrastructure.

In addition to always keeping the customer experience in mind, plan for changes in customer communications preferences, and think about your employees. Avoid taking a step backward in critical functionalities by making choices that give you the flexibility to adapt pieces of your overall IT infrastructure over time.

Implementing a strong workforce management strategy that can be easily adapted in the future will help drive efficiency. More importantly, it will help you reach and exceed your customer service goals.

Christian Szpilfogel is the VP of Strategy at Mitel.

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