Workforce Management Featured Article
Filling the Gap Between Help Desk Schedules and Adherence
In the contact center today, an omnichannel customer experience is the ultimate goal. You want customers to be able to contact you by a variety of channels and have their experience follow them from person to person and channel to channel. To do this, you need not only a change in mindset from standard contact center operating protocols, but a desktop solution (or linked solutions) that allows agents to see a 360-degree customer view.
While Salesforce is a pioneer in cloud-based sales force automation, the company also populates Gartner’s (News - Alert) leader quadrants for customer relationship management (CRM) and customer engagement. Quite a few contact centers are using Salesforce’s Service Cloud to automate service processes, streamline workflows, and source key articles, topics, and experts to transform the agent experience. Many of these organizations are unaware of the benefits of incorporating workforce management into the solution. It can make forecasting easier and more accurate, allowing contact centers to optimize their resources; provide real-time visibility into the workforce; and allow agents to provide a better customer experience.
Workforce optimization solution provider Monet Software (News - Alert) offers its Monet Live Workforce Management as an add-on for Salesforce Service Cloud to allow users of the latter to gain better visibility into what their agents or help desk representatives are doing. The integration consists of two main components. The first piece is a widget that sits on the console. It passes the data to Monet Live, WFM for Salesforce Service Cloud via the streaming API. The second component is a service that uses the REST APIs to extract the data that will be used for forecasting.
There are three critical pieces of information Monet Live WFM for Salesforce Service Cloud can use to improve forecasting as well as performance.
Case/chat history. The historical files will return arrivals and average handle time (AHT) for each case on a 15-minute interval basis. Managers can see how many cases arrive in each queue, and how much time is spent working on them for every 15-minute interval of the day. The interval in which case volume is reported is based upon when a case enters a queue. AHT is based upon the amount of time the case is in focus in the Salesforce Service Cloud console. Handle time is then put through a “smoothing process” to avoid abnormal handle times having a disproportionate effect.
Agent history. Visibility at the agent level can help users of the linked solutions to plan schedules better. The agent history feature allows managers to know how much time an agent spends handling cases. The volume and AHT (average handle time) collected is also tied to the agent doing the work. This allows Monet WFM to return per agent volume and AHT, which can lead to better performance management as well as forecasting.
Real-time agent statuses. The Monet Workforce Monitor allows agents to select customizable statuses. These statuses are sent in real time (with a less than five-second delay). This allows managers to compare scheduled activities versus their actual statuses within the Monet WFM graphic interface. The omnichannel widget within Salesforce Service Cloud is also supported.
Monet WFM Live for Service Cloud was designed to fill in the traditional gap between agent schedules and actual adherence to those schedules as a way to track case workload and make it visible to scheduling resources. It allows a help desk to build accurate forecasts and optimal schedules, and track the performance of help desk workers…all in real time.
