Workforce Management Featured Article
Automation Was a Hot Topic at the Recent ICMI Event
At the recent ICMI Contact Center Demo and Conference in Long Beach, Calif., thousands of contact center industry professionals gathered to discuss what’s new in the contact center industry. While there are many new technologies and ideas about the best way to support customers and offer a great customer experience, automated solutions were one of the biggest topics discussed.
When the contact center was a call center – a boiler room in which every employee engaged in the same tasks – there wasn’t a great need for automation. Information was sparse, needs were simpler and customers were less demanding. Today, of course, the omnichannel customer support environment needs to be flexible, responsive and nearly omniscient. There’s an overload of data, and making sense of it all is quite simply too much for any human manager to do. Without automation, contact centers lose out on operational efficiencies that could bring down costs, and customers lose out on the kind of personalized customer experience they’ve come to expect.
At the Monet booth, company personnel helped contact center managers realize the benefits of automated workforce management, particularly when it’s delivered via the cloud, according to Chuck Ciarlo, the company’s CEO. Many managers of smaller contact centers are still inclined to believe that robust automation is the provenance of larger companies only.
“We had several discussions with managers at these smaller centers, who were looking for ways to achieve more accurate forecasts and schedules than what they were getting from spreadsheets,” wrote Ciarlo in a recent blog post. “We offered demos of Monet WFM Live – Workforce Management in the Cloud, and they were always impressed by its capabilities. But was it worth the investment for a smaller business?”
Delivery by cloud is what enables smaller businesses to take advantage of “big company” features at an affordable price. Thanks to the cloud delivery model, return on investment (ROI) can be achieved much more quickly. In addition, companies without deep pockets can eliminate paying for endless (and expensive) software updates, as the cloud means that updates are implemented automatically at no cost.
Many cloud-based contact center workforce management solutions include all the features companies need to build great forecasts and schedules and – just as important – adhere to those schedules. They offer companies of all sizes capabilities for forecasting, scheduling, ACD integration, real-time agent adherence, intra-day management and agent-supervisor collaboration. The result is a vast improvement of service levels and a reduction in contact center costs without the upfront expenses and IT requirements of traditional workforce management software or the limitations of scheduling spreadsheets. They also help companies track and analyze key metrics to optimize service quality and contact center and agent performance.
Thanks to the cloud and advances in workforce optimization, even smaller companies can offer the kind of personalized, high quality and responsive service that is usually associated only with companies lucky enough to have very large software budgets.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi