The Benefits of Workforce Management for Contact Centers

July 14, 2008

By Michelle Robart, Workforce Management Editor

As productivity tools, workforce management (WFM) solutions benefit the contact center, its agents and customers. They cut down on agent inefficiency, absenteeism and minimize idle time. WFM can also improve customer service by increasing agent availability and decreasing the need for call backs.

As a workforce management solution provider, Monet is a forecasting and agent scheduling application ideal for contact centers. By creating optimized employee schedules, Monet improves service levels and reduces center costs.

Monet provides real and virtual skill-based scheduling WFM, which improves customer satisfaction by ensuring agents with certain expertise are available to answer questions quickly.

In addition to inbound calls, Monet can manage outbound calls, e-mails, Web chats, and other back office processes. While intuitive and affordable enough to benefit centers with as few as 25 agents, the software scales to thousands of agents.

With Monet’s WFM, staff satisfaction will increase, as it eliminates the uncertainty of manual scheduling, allowing agents to manage their own schedules and set their own schedule preferences as a reward for outstanding performance. By establishing a ranking system, agents are motivated to do a better job.

Large contact centers see the widest dispersion rate of WFM solutions since improving productivity here is crucial for operations.

However, WFM applications are also becoming increasingly critical for mid-to-large size, multi-site, multi-skill and multi-channel environments. With new vendors and products being offered, the market options are more varied than ever.

Now, enterprises can select either purchased or hosted solutions and applications can be targeted specifically to the needs and budgets of all contact centers.

In an effort to meet the diverse needs of contact centers globally, WFM vendors have created systems able to manage numerous staffing approaches and options. WFM is a complex application; forecasting and scheduling for multi-site, multi-skill and multi-channel contact centers is challenging. However technical and functional enhancements have made them easier to use, increasing their penetration rate and boosting interest in this market.

When used properly, Monet WFM applications deliver quantifiable and qualitative benefits for contact centers, agents and customers.

Michelle Robart is a Contributing Editor at TMCnet. To read more of her articles please visit her columnist page.