For the past 10 years, we have utilized the cloud to help customers fed up with manually managing their contact center technology and personnel. So, it surprises us when we hear that there are still so many contact centers trying to perform workforce optimization without automation tools. In their What’s In Your WFO? 2014 Report, ICMI discovered that 66% of contact center managers are not utilizing automation to tie together agent performance and operational data. What a headache! This makes more sense in light of another statistic: almost 55% of the contact center professionals surveyed revealed that their contact centers run on a premise-based system, while another 29% said their contact centers are partly premise-based. That means that roughly 84% of contact centers are not fully utilizing the cloud and its automation capabilities.
Though a majority of contact centers have not adopted workforce optimization automation, there are plenty of contact center professionals who view it as a priority. According to the ICMI study:
- 47% want the functionality to automatically move agents from one skill, or channel, to another based on volume
- 45% want the ability to update agent schedules automatically
- 40% want to automate the building of volume forecasting models
Workforce managers know that effective agent scheduling is extremely critical for the health of their business and the happiness of their agents. With this in mind, ICMI asked respondents for their top 3 scheduling challenges. The results were not surprising:
- Getting agents to regularly adhere to schedules (47%)
- Lack of sufficient funding to meet objectives (46%)
- Managing and responding to real-time changes in workload/staff availability (45%)
Many contact centers continue to have trouble shifting agents depending on call volume and skills, scheduling agents on the fly, and forecasting for the future. With a cloud workforce management system, these three functions become a lot easier. You can find the full ICMI guide here.
