Workforce Management Featured Article
UK Contact Centers Run Decades Behind in Workforce Management Adoption
Workforce management solutions designed for the contact center help companies today achieve significant improvements, both in service quality and operational efficiency. They can help balance the needs of the customer support organization by ensuring sufficient human resources are available to properly address customer needs while at the same time ensuing that the company isn’t wasting money on resources it doesn’t require. It’s not a new idea: companies have been engaging in workforce management manually, on paper and then on spreadsheets, for a very long time.
Modern workforce management software simply makes life for contact center managers easier. It helps with creating a forecast of contact arrival patterns taking into consideration historical data and other information, and creates scheduling assignments based on those forecasts, all the while providing reporting and alerts when potential problems crop up. Thanks to today’s cloud delivery, many of these solutions are available on a “pay-as-you-go” model, and can be used by geographically disparate workers.
The strange news, according to a recent study by Business Systems (UK) Ltd., is that the technology hasn’t really caught on yet in the UK. The report, entitled, “The State of Workforce Management in Contact Centres – 2016,” surveyed 100 contact center professionals about their workforce management adoption and challenges. Despite the demonstrable benefits of workforce management, only 29 percent of respondents said they have a workforce management solution in place. Even more alarming, 90 percent of those who have a workforce management solution in place do not derive the expected value.
This is terrible news for British customers and contact center workers, according to a recent blog post by Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert).
“Workforce management has been around since the 1980s – this is not a shiny new toy that hasn’t been proven in the real world,” he wrote. “If seven out of every 10 contact centers in the UK are still getting by with spreadsheets and other means, we can only wonder how much better they could be doing by embracing a solution that can revolutionize their forecasting, scheduling and staffing procedures.”
So whose fault is this? Inflexible managers who prefer spreadsheets because “we’ve always done it this way?” The study suggests it may be more the fault of the solutions on offer in the UK. The number one cited reason for not adopting a workforce management solution was the failure of enterprise solution vendors to facilitate successful deployments by offering adequate support with customization and training (67%), followed by a disappointing experience with inflexible off-the-shelf solutions (33 percent).
Ciarlo notes that it’s important that contact centers to engage in pre-purchase research to find a solutions provider that will help match a solution to their needs, and offer robust assistance in areas such as reporting, support, and overall performance.
“Great WFM solutions are available – it’s up to contact center managers to do their due diligence and find a solution with the customization, flexibility, user-friendliness and support they require,” he wrote.
Ensure that contact center managers and even agents are the ones making decisions about a purchase rather than the person who frees up the cash on the executive office floor who has never set foot inside a contact center. Ask about installation support and post-installation training, and consider a cloud-based solution you’re not married to forever in case you fall out of love with it. Management of the workforce on a day-to-day (even minute-to-minute) basis is simply too critical to turn over to a sub-par solution…or no solution at all.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi