Ensuring Workforce Optimisation Effectiveness
Workforce Optimisation (WFO) has a critical role to play in enabling customer service effectiveness.
Effective WFO is all about successfully integrating WFO technology components. These include:
- Workforce Management
- Quality Monitoring
- Performance Management
- Customer Surveys
- Customer Service Analytics
WFO helps to inform the right decisions and contributes directly to ensuring service excellence. However, it also places an increased focus on its agents and managers, making sure that they have the right training, development and coaching
1. Refocusing on customer service effectiveness
While Workforce Optimisation (WFO), with its many different technology components and processes, represents a powerful approach for customer service organisations looking to secure contact centre efficiencies, it also has a critical role to play in enabling customer service effectiveness.
Traditionally contact centre management has been tactically focused on efficiency, and that should always remain an essential goal. However there are other, potentially more beneficial uses of contact centre management resources than simply a relentless pursuit of efficiency. Research firm Gartner, for example, suggests that the benefits of an integrated WFO solution can enable information, insights, workflow and core contact centre functions to be ‘melded so that they complement and align with the
business’ high-level strategy’.
An effective contact centre optimisation strategy means ensuring that the goals your contact centre is focused on actually relate to – and support – your organisation’s broader business goals. While traditional, time-oriented metrics can show efficient contact centre resource usage and quantifiable service-level performance, it’s perhaps a mistake to assume that there’s a direct link between this and more qualitative enterprise goals such as customer satisfaction or customer retention.
That’s why WFO has such an important role to play in helping contact centres to not only refocus on customer service effectiveness, but also share their
expertise with the rest of the business.
Today’s contact centres find themselves right at the heart of customer engagement, carrying out an ongoing dialogue with current, returning and churning customers – and also engaging with the many customers who have had to escalate their enquiry to the contact centre from other channels.
Effective WFO is all about successfully integrating WFO technology components such as workforce management, quality monitoring, performance management, customer surveys and customer service analytics, and successfully uncovering the business trends and root cause of employee and customer behaviours. Done right, WFO helps to inform the right decisions and contributes directly to ensuring service excellence. However it also places an increased focus on the contact centre, and its agents and managers, and on making sure that they have the right training, development and coaching to deliver the right behaviours for customer service success.
Want to read more?
- Refocusing on customer service effectiveness
- The value of non-quantifiable workforce optimisation benefits
- Aligning WFO with improved Customer Engagement
- Externalising customer focus with WFO
- Enabling more strategic Customer Management activities
