Workforce Management Featured Article
Why Workforce Management is Good for the Back Office
The contact center often exists as the main portal through which a company will deliver customer care. That may be through order taking, problem resolution or simple information gathering. The expectations of the customer on the other end of the interaction channel could have much to do with the industry, but the organization of the contact center and the performance of its agents also play a part.
For that reason, a number of contact centers have made the necessary investments in workforce management. Companies like Monet Software offer workforce management solutions to help the contact center boost the accuracy of forecasts and schedules and to calculate the necessary resources needed to support the center during a particular campaign. These calculations are often based on historical data and other variables.
The challenge in these environments is that the contact center is also often impacted by sales, marketing and shipping, all of which tend to fall outside of the workforce management solution. The good news is that this doesn’t have to be the norm. It is possible to implement workforce management in the back office so that these areas are positively affecting the contact center.
When workforce management is in place for the back office, it has been shown to deliver more precise data and analytics on typical back office operations. The level of transparency enjoyed with the workforce management solution is now possible on manual tasks, processes and even work times for this extended team. It also syncs the back office with the front office so the promises made to the customer on the front end can be honored on the back end.
This approach to operations ensures that consistency across the board and a better customer experience. For the most part, customers aren’t always expecting the world, but they do expect consistency and integration across the organization. As soon as they have to be transferred to another department and explain the reason for the call all over again, the experience suffers.
At the same time, if they have to wait in the queue too long to talk to a live agent, they may hang up and call the competition. Without a robust workforce management solution in place to ensure you’ve scheduled according to anticipated traffic levels, this could easily happen. When all operations are synched across the same platform, satisfaction is experienced by customers, agents and even management.
If your organization is still operating in silos, but expecting sales agents to deliver on customer expectations, it’s time to make a change. Your next investigative stop should be into workforce management and what it could do for your integrated environment.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
