Fluidity in Providing a Customer Experience Requires Fluidity in Workforce Management

While a few forward-thinking companies are doing amazing things with omnichannel customer support today, most companies are admittedly mired in the past. Contact centers are large and unwieldy, and many companies have been burned before by investments that cost them a lot of money and gained them very little value. As a result, they continue to operate as if it’s 1999 with siloed voice channels, sluggish e-mail response time and hit-or-miss successes with newer channels such as mobile app or social media. It’s not only about a lack of technology, it’s about the way the contact centers are still managing their human resources.

There are agents hired specifically for one channel. In customer service today there are walls at every turn–there are walls for agents and walls for customers,” wrote Blake Morgan for Forbes recently. “There is no fluidity. Fluidity in customer experience puts you light years ahead of your competitors. It is the number one, no-brainer way to flood your gates with customers (in a good way).”

From the standpoint of managing workers in the contact center, this means that you may need to completely rewrite the book. You should probably be cross-training workers across different media channels. No longer can there be phone agents, Web chat agents and those assigned to occasionally look in in social media to make sure no one is saying something awful about your organization on your Facebook (News - Alert) page. For this reason, you may have to ramp up your workforce management efforts considerably, and choose a solution that can be flexible and changed quickly as the needs of your customers change, regardless of channel.

It’s also necessary to provide your agents with a little breathing room to help customers to the best of their ability. If you’re still clocking them on average handle time and punishing them for going above and beyond for a customer, that’s a real problem. Customers expect a great experience today, and to meet that expectation, your agents need to be smart, well-trained and have the ability to go off-script and actually do something to solve a screw-up.

“As a customer if you have an interaction with a company and that company refuses to give you reparations for damages–you are looking at a company with a c-suite that doesn’t value customers,” wrote Morgan. “A c-suite that values customer experience will give the company a budget for the inevitable uh-ohs. These uh-ohs are moments that the company has screwed up and needs to fix the relationship with the customer. The company that does not allot a budget for uh-ohs has left itself in a vulnerable position. Bad things happen.”

When bad things happen, companies need to know about it immediately, and they need to have agents who are capable of using their initiative to solve the problems, and the time they take is going to throw off the schedule. To compensate, managers may need to make changes very quickly. Is your workforce management and scheduling solution up to this challenge? If it’s not smart, capable of changes on-the-fly or intelligent in providing the kind of reporting managers need to ensure everything’s covered, it’s probably not doing you any favors in your quest to build a customer support infrastructure for 2015.