Workforce Management Featured Article
WFM Allows for Variety - The Spice of Life
I’ve been writing about business communications nearly 30 years, and I still enjoy it. I get to write about a broad range of topics. I have the opportunity to talk to a lot of interesting people. And every day is a little different.
Not everybody has it so good.
In the past, call center agents tended to do the same thing day in and day out. But the rise of the multichannel contact center now offers customer service representatives more opportunity for variety in their work. That is, if their employers schedule them to allow for some variety. And studies suggest that they would be wise to do so.
Marketing professors Cassie Mogilner and Jordan Etkin published the paper “Will Variety Make You Happy?” A Knowledge@Wharton reporter interviewed Mogilner, a Wharton marketing professor, about that study. Here are a few excerpt of what she had to say.
“In [our research], we looked at the effect of variety of our activities on overall happiness,” explained Mogilner. “We found that over a day or a week or a month, variety — perhaps consistent with people’s perceptions — leads to greater happiness. However, over shorter periods of time than a day, such as an hour, 15 minutes [or a] half-hour, when variety actually does get experienced as multitasking, it actually becomes fairly stressful, and instead of variety increasing my happiness, it makes me less happy.”
She suggested: “When you’re thinking over the course of the day, maybe [you could] do one type of activity in the morning [and another] type of activity in the afternoon. You’ll feel more productive. The reason variety makes you feel happier over these longer periods of time is because it keeps you engaged. It offsets that potential for boredom and burnout.”
Workforce management software can allow contact center managers to schedule agents to do a greater variety of tasks. That can serve to keep things more interesting for agents – and to drive better engagement, and thus results, in the process.
WFM can also be used to match agent skillsets with specific tasks. So the customer service representatives are most efficient or best trained to address social media, for example, can be assigned to do that kind of thing. At leEdited by Maurice Nagle
