Workforce Management Featured Article
How Should Digital Transformation Change Workforce Management?
If your workforce management leaves a lot to be desired, chances are good you’re using an older platform that may not be reflecting today’s contact center or help desk workforce reality. While companies are still looking to provide the most accurate information in the right channels at the right time, the way to do it has changed in recent years thanks to digital transformation (as have customer expectations), so it makes sense that the workforce management solution needs to evolve to keep up with the digital workplace.
What is “Digital Transformation” in WFM?
While the term gets used a lot, digital transformation will mean different things to different enterprise functions. In workforce management, it means the following:
Encompassing social. Customers are increasingly looking for helps and answers on social platforms like Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter, which means that agents are spending more time in these apps. If your workforce management hasn’t been updated to account for social channels, it’s probable that you’re losing a lot of time and quality of service to social without understanding why. Ensure any solution you choose can support and interface with social channels.
Accommodating the mobile workforce. The days of all agents sitting in a physical contact center are over. Contact center assets may include remote and distributed personnel, home-based agents, and service employees or technicians who are on the road. Ensure your workforce management solution isn’t built to support only premise-based landlines, or you’ll be bleeding a lot of resources that are unaccounted for because they’re mobile.
Analytics. While older versions of WFM solutions only collected information, newer solutions analyze it using twenty-first century technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, as well as new generations of speech recognition. Thanks to intelligent speech analytics, you can truly hear “the voice of the customer,” but in a more aggregated way that’s faster and easy to understand. Speech analytics capabilities such as those offered by Monet Software make it easy to evaluate calls in near real-time, search for key phrases and discover actionable data from customer interactions. Likewise, predictive analytics can do a better job of pulling issues that may directly or indirectly affect schedules (like the weather, for example) into play for more accurate forecasts.
Ensure it’s distributed. Most companies use a combination of talent and resources, including staff and contract, premise-based and off-site, home-based, remote, mobile and outsourced. Earlier generations of workforce management couldn’t accommodate these increasingly distributed workforces. Ensure you choose a fully cloud-based solution so employees and other workers’ efforts can be optimized from wherever they happen to be working.
It’s 2019…can your workforce management keep up?
