Workforce Management Can Really Change your Business
Author: Bob Kelly, Vice President of the PerformanceEdge Group at AspectI think it’s fair to say that since the first call center was founded more than 35 years ago, contact center managers have thought about workforce management on a daily basis. In the beginning, technology was less sophisticated than it is today and customer needs were less complex. But, supervisors still had to make sure they scheduled enough agents to handle incoming calls in a timely fashion.
As time has progressed, and the call center has morphed into the multi-channel, multi-site, multi-skilled contact center, the notion of workforce management has become increasingly more complex and perhaps even more important. Today, workforce management in the contact center isn’t just about scheduling. It’s about making sure that you have the right number or agents with the right skills, all the time, for both inbound and outbound inquiries, across all locations and ensuring that agents are adhering to their schedules through real-time monitoring.
The good news is that, unlike your predecessors, you have access to proven technology that can help you meet your organization’s customer service, collections and sales goal. In fact, you’re probably already using workforce management solutions to streamline agent schedule change requests and notifications, track and manage agent adherence and productivity, optimize workforce performance, forecast and schedule in multi-site environments, control quality with outsourced agents, and to do strategic planning, among other things. And, you’re most likely also using workforce management solutions to ensure compliance.
But, workforce management capabilities don’t need to be confined to optimizing agent schedules and ensuring compliance. You should also be using it to reduce what is likely the third most expensive component of your organization’s budget – real estate costs. There is now a workforce management solution available that can generate seating plans that optimize the use of your facilities, enabling you to reduce administrative overhead and increase adherence for operations with flexible open seating policies. Some of today’s workforce management solutions are also designed to help you better track when your employees are traveling, or working from home or other locations so that you can automate “hot desking” and further reduce your real estate and administrative costs.
In these tough economic times, your company is most likely mandating across-the-board cost cutting initiatives. Is your workforce management solution living up to its potential?
Author: Aspect
Catergories: Contact Center Technology, Performance Optimization
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