Customer experience is key to being a thriving call center, but not every call center achieves it. There are a lot of moving pieces that contribute to improving CX that are easy to overlook. Maximizing the productivity, quality, and efficiency of your call center team is no small feat. Not only do you need to focus on customer satisfaction, but you also need to empower your workforce and improve processes.
Are you currently using workforce engagement (WEM)? If not, you will likely implement a WEM solution after doing further research. A WEM software suite combines recording, quality management (QM), and other call center technologies into one console to oversee call center performance. Removing the guesswork from performance management gives your contact center a competitive advantage.
How does implementing WEM lead to better CX outcomes?
The goal is to increase service levels and enhance CX without overburdening agents. It can assist with employee scheduling, employee engagement, and digital tools to achieve optimum productivity from your workforce. If WEM efforts are lacking, you risk sacrificing the agent experience, which defeats its purpose in the long term.
Employee experiences have to be a top priority. You can improve agent wellbeing and job satisfaction while meeting your defined KPIs without sacrificing your business goals like service level and high occupancy. There are some tips to include in your WEM program that will significantly improve your call center’s productivity and CX.
1- Scheduling Flexibility
Make sure to offer flexibility in scheduling to attract and retain talent. Modern WEM solutions allow agents to choose their preferred slot and swap shifts, maintaining work-life balance without compromising productivity.
Give agents the power of self-utilization to manage, document, and improve their work schedules is the right step in the direction of improved agent productivity. While every enterprise attempts to maximize the efficiency of a company’s employees, given the increasing work that comes in, micro-managing each employee’s daily task is a challenge.
2- Integrated platforms
Omnichannel solutions can help you maximize your contact center’s performance. It makes it easy to access operation information across performance, compliance, business outcomes and more. You can also automate schedules while balancing shift rules, work hours, breaks, off times, and the skills of your personnel.
When everything you need is located in one platform you are able to capture 100% of interactions, wherever your agents are. One platform also lets you easily search, play, score, and report on all customer engagements. By offering your team the right tools you can better manage processes and focus on growing and strengthening your organization.
3- Performance Management
Improving employee performance is not always easy. With a proper quality management tool in place, contact center supervisors will have both a bird’ eye view and a ground-level perspective on the inner functioning of their support teams. It gives them the capability to review every voice/email/chat/social media interaction while helping them score the results against industry standards.
Agents will receive both positive and constructive performance feedback, which is shown to help improve efficiency. In turn, agents can also interact with the tool and add their input to ensure a fair and accurate scoring system.
4- Predict demand
Avoid overburdening agents – WEM tools include demand forecasting capabilities so you can prepare a contingent workforce for peak periods. Many customers are not aware of the backend demand that call centers are experiencing – customers expect top-of-the-line service regardless of how busy it is.
5- Use Data Insights
WEM platforms can reveal insights in real-time. As workforce management solutions offer KPI dashboards and reports through agent portals, agents will manage their performance with strategic management inputs.
Harness contact center analytics from within. Take advantage of the rapid growth in customer data to advance decision-making that is informed by analytics. The best contact centers understand the importance of analyzing customer feedback across multi-channel interactions to because it informs proactive customer experience strategies.
The agent is prepared to answer the phone or reply to customers via other channels by applying analytics to interactions. When agents have access to customer data making predictions about customer demands or answering any concerns is easy. Providing this level of empowerment through data goes a long way to improving customer retention and reducing agent attrition.
6- Employee Engagement
Engage employees in professional development programs to expand and hone their skillset. Better trained employees provide better service to customers. Employee engagement is one of the most important contributors to an organization’s competitive advantage.
Highly engaged people at work tend to be happier and more productive. Conversely, disengaged employees tend to have a negative attitude that often affects the level of service they provide and, in extreme cases, may drive away customers. As a result, companies have started to focus on employee engagement strategies to improve performance and retention and nurture innovation.
Like most WEM efforts, managing employee engagement is not an isolated activity but part of an overall WFM solution. It relates to the way companies treat employees, what information is available, whether adequate training is provided, and how much control they have over their work schedule and performance.
Invest in WEM for both agents and your customers
Today, workforce engagement has become a necessity. As a critical foundation technology, it features best-in-class solutions and has become more adaptive than ever before. They allow contact centers to pinpoint agent behaviors while playing to their strengths and weaknesses to predict optimal performance. As technology evolves, so will the impact that WEM has on the overall customer experience.
But at the end of the day, it should be seen as an investment made for your agents because they are why your customers will keep coming back to you for business. Investing in WEM and employees pays off in many ways, some directly operational while externally, the impact to CX or Customer Experience is becoming more highly recognized. As you layout ensure your CX or digital transformation (DX) strategies, be sure to consider your most valuable resource, your agents.
