Creating a delicious treat in the kitchen is no easy task. For most of us “non-cooking” types, we prefer to use some baseline recipe to get us started. For example, a cake requires some key ingredients in order for it to look and taste like a cake. Flour, eggs, sugar, salt, baking powder…you get the point. The same analogy applies for creating a legendary customer journey. Workforce Optimization is a key ingredient for success in your customer journey. Customer interactions, experience and insights to those interactions allow you to create smarter customer engagements.
There are three crucial components, when the key technology ingredients are mixed properly, create a winning recipe for your customer journey. Let’s take a closer look at each of those areas.
Optimize the Workforce
Optimization of the workforce is about people, process, performance, along with the technology that ties together human behaviors with your operational metrics. It’s the human element of the business operations that consist of 60 to 70 percent of contact center cost. Effective workforce management is about having the right skilled people, in the right place, at the right time, to handle an accurately forecasted workload that meets service level. Now, more than ever, effective foundations of workforce management are much more important to ensure that new complexities, channels, and customers are properly addressed given the direct impact to your bottom line.
Workforce Management provides the ability to forecast all your channels, volumes, arrival patterns, and handle time with accuracy. Allows you to view or accommodate historic and event-based drivers. Create flexibility within schedules that promotes a more happy and engaged staff. Monitor and manage these contact center activities and adherence in real-time by automating these functions through technology. Without automation, workforce management decisions become arbitrary and are based on emotions, rather than true business decisions.
Improve Processes
Continuous improvement processes are about identifying the key business drivers and critical behaviors that align with your corporate vision and values to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Quality Management should stretch across all customer communication channels and address the unique attributes of those channels. It’s not just about voice anymore. Email, chat, voice, social, must now be aggregated and measured to ensure consistency in the customer experience. Responses and scores should also be compared to customer satisfaction measurements for alignment of expectation and practice. With Quality Management, automation improves the customer to agent interactions and the agent to supervisor interactions.
Performance management provides the proper monitoring of business trends and performance analytics that deliver the most usable and actionable intelligence within your organization. Performance Management should consist of your primary business metrics; both at the employee level as well as organizationally, that contain both service (quality) metrics and efficiency (cost-based) metrics. Streamline and communicate the most important metrics that employees directly impact that ultimately lead to high customer satisfaction and the best customer experience.
Coaching is about the improving behaviors. Employees want to perform at their best. Coaching automation through technology allows supervisors and managers to encourage employee engagement in the mentoring process and provides focus on specific employee opportunities. Auto-assign and track mentoring sessions to employees, notify employees when coaching opportunities arise, optimize the scheduled time for the session to occur, and promote employee engagement by allowing feedback comments about their coaching experience.
eLearning provides contact centers consistent delivery of training materials and content across large audiences. eLearning provides consistent and objective assessments of materials as well as tracking and monitoring of completion. eLearning can quickly offset instructor-led training cost, and can be used to ensure process and procedure updates are quickly dispersed.
Enrich Customer Interactions
Analytics-driven quality allows you to quickly identify and flag opportunities and interactions that need attention or that demonstrate successful experiences. Issue resolution is easily identified and corrected. Identification of distress based on language or tone with either the employee or the customer. Prediction of customer satisfaction and resolution or successful or unsuccessful sales attempts were completed during a call.
NICE CXone platforms combined with workforce optimization-powered by Verint, in the cloud creates a winning recipe for success.
Smart Workforce + Smart Moments = Smarter Engagement
JaNae Forshee is Director of Cloud WFO Practices at Verint, a longtime NICE CXone partner and Platinum Sponsor of ICUC 2015.
