Workforce Management Featured Article
Filling the Gaps in Customer Satisfaction Reality in the Contact Center
There’s a huge disconnect in contact centers today. While most of them – better than 90 percent – claim that customer service quality is their number one goal and customer satisfaction is their most important metric – they’re simply not able to live up to the dream. According to a survey conducted by the UK’s ContactCentres, most companies say they’re being held back because they lack the resources to excel.
The survey asked respondents to identify the top three reasons they’re unable to meet customer satisfaction targets, and respondents picked issues related to finances and technology: “budget” at 80.6 percent, “IT issues” at 59.1 percent and the “need for new technology” at 53.8 percent. Other obstacles identified included “conflicting business priorities” at 47.9 percent and “broken processes” at 40.9. Most contact centers simply don’t have the money to provide quality customer support.
While in a perfect world, contact centers would have all the resources they need, budgets do exist, and money doesn’t grow on trees (just as our fathers warned us during childhood). Additionally, companies may be consciously or unconsciously sidelining contact center needs because they view them as a money sinkhole: a place to drop cash that will never see any return on investment. It’s therefore important for call centers to identify the areas where money is the most well spent when it comes to improving the customer experience.
Focus on Building Efficiency
One of the ways contact centers can best spend their limited resources is by finding new, efficient ways of working.
“Eradicate a siloed mentality, promote consistent ways of working and encourage contact center staff to collaborate with the rest of the organization,” wrote Colin Hay for ContactCentres. “By sharing knowledge, tips and learning the whole organization will be inspired to deliver first-class customer experiences and boost business success. Transform service by using intelligent data to add context to contact conversations.”
Workforce Management Limits Waste and Increases Forecast Accuracy
One of the most intelligent ways to use data is to focus on bringing your workforce management into the 21st century. With manual time and attendance systems, call center management spends hours troubleshooting timecard problems such as missing shift start and end times, indecipherable writing, and math errors. Automated workforce management solutions such as Verint Monet save time and increases accuracy for managers, and intelligent forecasting ensures that the right number of agents are on the phones at all times, eliminating expensive over-staffing or disastrous under-staffing.
Workforce management can save time and money in other ways, including:
Reducing employee turnover. Well managed employees are more likely to stick with their jobs.
Minimize overtime. Proper forecasting reduces the need to scramble at the last minute with shift coverage that could result in overtime.
Reduce payroll errors. Resolving payroll errors costs companies a great deal of money, plus the trust of employees.
Allowing agents to manage their own schedules. With a modern workforce management solution, agents can request time off, swap schedules and choose vacation preferences. This frees up managers from having to do this work manually, and increases the perception of fairness among agents.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
