Achieving Service Excellence With Workforce Management
Companies must demand excellence of execution from their contact centers in order to survive in an increasingly competitive business world. Experts believe that a crucial element of success in the 21st century contact center is the ability to organize and respond quickly to key customer demands, rather than simply focusing on the internal, operational metrics of the past.
On this subject, Jim Davies, principal analyst at Gartner, said, Before, everything in the contact center was driven by efficiency, but we are now in an environment where everything is driven by the customer experience. At the same time, contact center managers have the same efficiency metrics they have always been trying to meet. With new technologies available, there should be much more willingness to move away from those old metrics and be more aware of how the contact center can impact the business as a whole.
Regardless of the particular product or service supported by the contact center, customers expect three main things (see Figure 1):
Customers expect their calls to be answered quickly;
Customers expect to deal with someone who has enough knowledge and skill to respond to their specific requests; and
Customers expect to be addressed by a person who is cheerful, motivated and responsive.
Balancing cost-driven operational improvements and customer-focused service delivery requires a coordinated platform of staffing management and analysis software commonly referred to as workforce management. To achieve both a higher level of efficiency and top-notch service, however, the system the center is using must be solidly focused on empowering not just managers, but individual agents. With a workforce management solution firmly focused on agent empowerment and the customer experience, the most significant challenges facing contact center managers today become eminently solvable problems.
Achieve Accurate Forecasting
The bedrock of contact center success is an ability to consistently meet both short-term and long-term goals. Workforce management provides the insight necessary for contact centers to build comprehensive, effective plans by first providing accurate forecasts of contact volume and resource requirements. Because even small variations from the plan can have a tremendous impact on the performance of the center, it is crucial that organizations use an effective forecasting algorithm. This minimizes the need for inefficient manual adjustments to the forecast and reduces the risk of costly dips in service level. The most accurate forecasts automatically account for recent daily trends as well as historical volumes, seasonal trends and expected contact handling times, while appropriately minimizing the impact of anomalies.
No forecasting and resource planning system can operate in a strategic vacuum. To make plans and schedules that work for their contact center, contact center managers and workforce planners must know three key things.
- Managers must know the companys customers and how strongly they value rapid-response, first-call resolution and a pleasant experience.
- Managers must know their margins and operating budget, so that they can design a staffing and contact channel mix that delivers the best experience possible for each customer.
- Managers must know what the company is trying to accomplish on any given contact, be it a fast response, delivering a thorough resolution to any problem regardless of how long it takes, or developing a cross-sell opportunity.
Once these factors are understood, a company can design a staffing strategy that best addresses the expected contact volume provided by the forecast. The power of effectively matching agent supply with contact demand cannot be overstated. Once your staffing plans are accurately set to handle those contacts you knew would come in, you are extremely well-positioned to deliver to customers the experience they demand, while using the schedules that your employees expected.
Enable Continuous, Intraday Improvement
Advances in workforce management give companies the ability to operate not just one or two fixed shifts, but a variety of flexible start and end times for each agent, depending on forecasted demand, agent expertise and agent preferences. But improving the customer experience requires more than simply enabling optimal schedules. Companies must evolve to use tools which immediately show the impact of schedule adjustments, and allow flexible changes to be made on a moments notice.
One of the most important things to understand is that the contact center operates continuously, and that continuous excellence is required. Achieving service level targets on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis is meaningless if customers are continually falling through the cracks, because every abandoned call represents potential lost revenue for the company.
Workforce management that ensures a top-notch customer experience must be able to provide continuous reporting and provide managers with the flexibility to make scheduling changes with rapid precision, down to the quarter-hour. For example, these rapid changes allow contact centers to quickly arrange overtime with agents already on-site during heavy contact volumes, or save unnecessary expenses by sending people home on unusually quiet days. Even in situations where a change in schedule is not necessary, real-time adherence monitoring allows coaches and supervisors to take immediate action when agent adherence or customer service levels fall below the target. Rather than waiting for yesterdays report, which merely tells you a problem existed, managers can intervene to resolve the difficulties agents are experiencing and bring the center back into compliance not just for the week or the day, but every 15 minutes. These strategic decisions must be supported with ongoing, real-time analysis monitoring the impact of intraday staffing decisions, so that such decisions can be made with greater accuracy and certainty each time.
This intraday power is what elevates the best workforce management solutions to become comprehensive contact center management tools. These systems provide essential visibility into customer demands, agent availability, capabilities and schedule adherence and enable contact center managers to efficiently and effectively react to unforeseen events which can occur during any interval of the day.
Operate a Multiskill Contact Center
Subject matter experts are the lifeblood of complex contact centers. With the growth of self-service tools to handle common inquiries, front-line agents are increasingly expected to have a wider range of expertise to handle tricky problems. Cultivating and then properly deploying skilled, expert representatives will allow you to best address complicated customer inquiries. But scheduling agents based on expertise can be difficult, because in the real world, many agents will have different levels of mastery over a wide range of topics.
Only a workforce management solution that can take a holistic view of the multiskilled agent will deliver the greatest value on that agents expertise. By forecasting demand based on the required skills to handle each contact and allocating agent availability that is proportionally balanced to put the right amount of specialized talent into the right contact queues, you can ensure that more customers will reach appropriately skilled agents on the first attempt. Advanced, multiskill-oriented workforce management systems allow agent resources to be efficiently pooled, taking advantage of agents primary and secondary skills, partial resource allocation, agents availability during specific time periods and overflow plans. When workforce management is used in conjunction with CRM, IVR and multiskill contact routing capabilities, organizations can perform skill matching where highly valued clients with specific needs are efficiently routed to appropriate agents. These agents not only have relevant account information already available, but also have all of the skills necessary to answer the clients need.
Deliver Self-Service Tools for Agent Empowerment
When competitors try to get your agents to jump ship for a small raise, how will you keep them? Money alone is neither a sustainable nor a unique advantage. Creating a better work environment by empowering your agents and giving them control over their destiny, however, can pay tremendous dividends. Not only will agents see themselves as a key long-term component of your strategy, but better morale leads to greater productivity and a more pleasant experience for customers.
Workforce management systems need not be dictatorial. They provide agents with the ability to input their preferences and bid for schedule slots, including requesting vacations and time off. Using an objective system for vacation scheduling that is keyed to well-understood schedule requirements and approval rules helps avoid the perception that choice slots are awarded on a preferential basis.
Self-service tools should also include agent performance tracking, allowing representatives to view their performance compared to goals and to peer groups. The best and ultimately most valuable reporting to the agents and managers desktops does not come simply in the form of static data, but also includes actionable alerts and pop-up reminders. These tools also alert agents to changes in schedules and facilitate confirmation.
In empowered environments, agents can better understand the goals and the vision of the contact center operation, not as a tactical endeavor to meet abstract service levels, but as a strategic and carefully planned business unit supporting critical interactions with the customers that lead to the enterprises profitability and continued success.
Self-management tools for agents can sometimes carry with them a brief adjustment period as agents learn the new system and regularly check on scheduling requests and personal performance metrics. This phenomenon generally fades quickly as the new tools become second nature. Agents ultimately become much more aware of the same measurements and reports that their supervisors use and are encouraged to make the most of the empowerment tools as they go about the business of handling customer contacts.
Make the Most of Constraints
Every contact center manager wishes for unlimited resources to allow perfect service to be delivered 100 percent of the time. But in the real world, all organizations face resource constraints. Workforce management can alleviate many of these constraints and create opportunities where in the past there would only be headaches.
One of the key resource constraints facing any contact center is the availability of the right pool of qualified staff. Using powerful workforce management systems that develop schedules based on several work groups blended into a single queue, however, can add power and flexibility to your contact center organization without introducing expensive redundancy. A multisite contact organization can easily act as one virtual center with the right support technology.
Just as important as blending multiple sites is blending multiple channels or contact media. Rather than requiring agents for alternative media, such as email and Web chat, to be managed inefficiently with a point solution, look to a workforce management solution which can help blend multiple contact media into your staffing plan, taking into account the different service level expectations for nonabandoning contacts and the need to include previous days backlog into current plans.
When coordinated with e-learning, quality monitoring and performance management systems, workforce management can also play a key role in delivering just-in-time training directly to the agents desktop, at the appropriate interval in their schedule. Managers and agents can work together to review organizational needs, quality monitoring and performance management scores and create appropriate skill development tracks for the agents. Mastery of a new subject area can be easily incorporated in future multiskill scheduling plans, creating new opportunities to deliver the best service experience possible to each customer.
Plan for Success
Any workforce management endeavor will not succeed unless it is based on sound principles and attainable goals. No change initiatives in the contact center can return positive results unless companies listen to what customers are telling them about their own experiences interacting with the firm. The biggest disconnect comes in those organizations which only look at the data theyre bringing in internally, and try to second-guess what customers are thinking. A lot of organizations dont survey their customers to find out if theyre really doing a good job, Davies says.
Customer satisfaction surveys are just one way to uncover the true priorities and attitudes of the customer base. Advanced automatic call distributor (ACD) analysis can reveal much about the true tolerance for hold times among customers, by monitoring when impatience comes into play and customers disconnect from the queue. Competitive benchmarking is also key. By understanding what rivals are delivering to their customers, you can turn the dial and deliver a better experience. A little homework and research go a long way in determining the right mix of service goals for your contact center.
In many cases, customers dont mind waiting a little longer on the phone if they feel satisfied with the service they received once their call is answered. Ensuring that the contact is a success requires efficient multi-skill awareness, so that customers reach the agents most qualified to address their issues. And the most empowered agents are the ones who will deliver the most pleasant and professional experience to customers.
The key to contact center success is the ability to ask hard questions and not cringe at the answers. Managers must know where their organization stands, and where their customers and agents stand, to deliver outstanding service to clients and outstanding value to the company.
Workforce management puts the right people in the right place at the right time to address the customer inquiries crucial to the success of your business. But only workforce management geared around improving the customer service experience and advancing agent empowerment can address all three requirements each and every caller has to be helped promptly, knowledgeably and passionately.
