The Future Technology of WFO

There are two things that are not going to change in the contact center universe:

1. Contact centers will never have enough staff.
2. Contact centers will always collect immense amounts of data.

When combined, the largest workforce optimization problem comes to the surface; contact centers never have enough time or people to make the data they collect actionable.  This means that they struggle to staff their center effectively, train and coach their agents, and listen to their customers. Luckily, technology in the WFO segment has continued to progress and become more cost effective to use, making it easier to justify from a cost-to-benefit perspective.  Two of the functionalities that are starting to gain adoption at a quicker pace include speech analytics and screen recording/analytics.

Speech analytics has one of the widest potential uses in the still-dominant voice world of contact centers.  Not only can it be used to coach and train agents on proper policies and techniques, it can also be used to quickly navigate the massive amounts of feedback being received through call recording and Voice of the Customer systems.  It saves contact centers from having to listen to recordings individually.  Instead, technology can assess and categorize voice data in real-time and provide reporting and analytics that can quickly be consumed by the call center.  This technology is also used a great deal by service recovery teams as a means of quickly identifying and connecting with dissatisfied customers.

Screen recording has always been a concern because of bandwidth and security concerns.  In the past few years, network infrastructures have caught up to and passed the software that runs on them.  Coupled with bandwidth tuning features built into most of the screen recording products,  it is finally relevant to contact centers beyond just the largest and most cash rich.  From a security perspective, these recordings  can often be secured in much the same ways that audio recordings are secured.  From an analytical perspective, these can be coupled with audio recordings to provide a 360-degree view of the contact transaction.

As your contact center grows and your needs become more sophisticated, it is important to remain aware of the technology that exists and is being developed to help faciliate this process.