How WFM Tools Create Success for Omnichannel Contact Centers
During the pandemic, customers turned to digital communications in droves for service and support. Contact centers quickly needed to pivot to add or enhance additional support channels such as chat, text, and email. Omnichannel support is now the de facto standard for many organizations, and this shift will continue to grow throughout 2023 and into the future.
Likewise, customer preferences for service and support through digital channels is prevalent across all audience types and demographics — from Gen Zers to baby boomers.
While it’s clear why customers prefer to choose their method of communication and support, delivering seamless navigation and touchpoints through the customer experience (CX) journey is challenging for contact centers. Meeting escalating customer expectations while simultaneously keeping agents satisfied and reducing operating costs can be intimidating.
But you’ve got this! The key to delivering a smooth omnichannel journey is to adopt the right strategy and the latest technologies — those designed with digital business in mind both for your customers and your employees. This article will help guide the way. We’ll reveal how modern workforce management (WFM) tools built with the customer in mind help you get there.
Related Article: Unlocking Productivity: Introduction To Workforce Management
What Is An Omnichannel Contact Center?
On this journey, your final destination is an omnichannel contact center that provides customers with consistently high-quality experiences across an ever-widening array of digital channels, including:
- Chat
- SMS
- Social media messaging
- Voice
An omnichannel experience is one where the interaction travels with the customer from channel to channel, and each new agent is able to seamlessly help the customer as they switch channels.
The goal is that customers are able to efficiently and effectively resolve their problems regardless of the channel they use. Why? Letting people connect with you their way will drive more sales. In a Zendesk CX survey, 93% of consumers said they would spend more with companies that offered them their preferred way to reach customer service.
Omnichannel contact center software has evolved to include unified routing and interaction histories that are available from one channel to another, making the relevant customer history available to agents at all times. Your agents can now deliver personalized cross-channel customer experiences that build loyalty while driving retention and higher sales.
Now that we know the destination, let’s map the journey.
Related Article: How to Deliver An Outstanding Omnichannel Customer Experience
The Road To Delivering Omnichannel
When evolving into an omnichannel contact center, upgrading the WFM tools you use to manage your most expensive and valuable resource — your staff or labor management — should be top of mind.
Why? Adding digital channels dramatically increases the complexity of delivering seamless CX while also keeping operational costs down and retaining skilled agents.
Once digital channels enter the picture you need to schedule enough agents to meet service level agreements (SLAs), but forecasting and scheduling agents to meet service demand across many channels is often easier said than done.
Using manual processes and spreadsheets, you may end up over-scheduling agents, which causes your costs to skyrocket, or, conversely, under-scheduling agents, which subjects your customers to unacceptable high wait times.
Ultimately you want a Goldilocks “just right” approach to forecasting and scheduling agents across all channels. Utilizing workforce management tools can help:
- Improve schedule adherence
- Provide visibility into contact center operations for key metrics such as service levels, occupancy, and forecasting accuracy
- Account for concurrent interactions across multiple channels which leads to more accurate forecasting and flexible scheduling
The Connection Between Agent Experience And Omnichannel Success
When forecasting and scheduling is inaccurate, agents will invariably experience frustration and quickly become overwhelmed, which leads to high rates of burnout and attrition. To avoid a decline in your omnichannel contact center performance, it’s vital that you optimize your scheduling and agent engagement practices.
But, fortunately, there is good news. The right WFM tools can help you meet the challenges of omnichannel forecasting, scheduling, and long-term planning.
Before we dive into recommendations of what to look for in an omnichannel-ready WFM solution, let’s take a step back to clarify some definitions.
It’s common to hear the terms Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) and Workforce Management (WFM) used interchangeably. WFM is often a solution contained within a WEM suite, in addition to being a standalone solution.
What Is Workforce Management?
WFM is the orchestration of tasks that make up the work an organization does. When managed effectively, workflows drive organizations to be more efficient, productive, and cost effective. Workforce management software in the contact center provides automated agent scheduling and forecasting capabilities, along with other features such as long-term workforce planning and real-time visibility. Ultimately, omnichannel WFM contact center solutions allow you to leverage your agent resources as efficiently and effectively as possible and support your workforce management strategy.
Modern workforce management tools not only let you ensure the right agent with the right skills is available on the right channel, but they also help you manage contact centers with a hybrid and/or remote workforce, making it easier to provide agents with flexible schedules.
For example, features like shift-swapping make it easier for agents to enjoy work-life balance and support time-off requests while ensuring you are staffed to meet forecasted demand.
Contact center workforce management systems are far from new, but the digital and omnichannel eras are here to stay and require a new set of requirements and workforce management processes for operational excellence.Related Article: What is Workforce Engagement Management? (And Why It Matters)
The Connection Between Agent Experience And Omnichannel Success
When forecasting and scheduling is inaccurate, agents will invariably experience overwhelm, which leads to high rates of burnout and turnover. Since ultimately this generates a decline in your omnichannel contact center performance, it’s vital that your scheduling practices be optimized.
But, fortunately, there is good news. The right WFM tools can help you meet the challenges of omnichannel forecasting, scheduling, and long-term planning.
Before we dive into recommendations of what to look for in an omnichannel-ready WFM solution, let’s take a step back and clarify some definitions.
These days it’s common to hear the terms Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) and Workforce Management (WFM) used interchangeably. In fact, as we’ll see below, WFM is often a solution contained within a WEM suite, in addition to being a standalone solution.
What Is Workforce Management?
Workforce management software in the contact center provides automated agent scheduling and forecasting, along with other features such as long-term planning and real-time visibility. Ultimately, WFM omnichannel contact center solutions allow you to leverage your agent resources as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Modern WFM tools not only allow you to ensure the right agent with the right skills is available on the right channel, but they also help you manage hybrid and distributed contact centers that make it easier to provide agents with flexible schedules.
For example, features like shift-swapping make it easier for agents to enjoy work-life balance while ensuring you are staffed to meet forecasted demand.
Contact center WFM software is far from new, but the digital and omnichannel eras bring the need to consider a new set of requirements for operational excellence.
Related Article: What is Workforce Engagement Management? (And Why It Matters)
What Is Workforce Engagement Management?
Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) suites provide a broader set of capabilities and empower contact center employees to perform an array of tasks including staff scheduling, evaluating, motivating, recognizing, and rewarding agents at scale.
A WEM suite commonly includes WFM and quality management as cornerstones, while also offering an array of add-on solutions to close the agent performance loop.
A WEM suite will typically include:
- Workforce Management – to help with employee scheduling to ensure that the right number of agents with the right skills are scheduled at the right time
- Quality Management – to ensure that all your customer interactions are up to service levels, regardless of channel and across all agents
- Coaching – to address performance gaps found through the QM application
- Gamification – to recognize employees for excellent performance
- Performance Management – to get a holistic view of operations
For many contact centers, effectively managing your agent resources will begin with the foundation of a WFM solution and then expand to leverage a complete WEM suite to take operational effectiveness to the next level.
Benefits of WFM Tools
As previously discussed, providing outstanding omnichannel customer experiences is critical yet extremely challenging for contact centers. Cloud-based workforce management solutions automate many of the speed bumps of agent forecasting, employee scheduling, and performance management, letting you create exceptional experiences with real-time visibility into your business. Workforce management tools provide wins for all your key constituents — the organization, agents, and most importantly, your customers
For Contact Centers
- Get real-time visibility of all contact channels in one place. Playvox WFM real-time dashboards and intuitive user interfaces provide both summary and detailed views of business performance allowing you to intelligently forecast, schedule, and monitor your workforce without the need of specialized resources or data analysts. You can’t do this with spreadsheets.
- Enjoy fully automated AI-generated omnichannel forecasts based on your specific business rules and priorities. Playvox WFM takes into account forecasts, KPIs, business requirements, human capital management, SLAs, and goals to create the most efficient schedule for your needs.
- Handle synchronous and asynchronous workloads seamlessly in an omnichannel environment and reduce costs by having the right agents available at the right time to service customers, without overstaffing.
For Agents
In 2022, the average agent turnover rate climbed as high as 30% for large customer service organizations. With increasing labor costs and the cost to replace an agent averaging more than $14,000, you can’t afford to stay stuck in this cycle. Addressing burnout is one solution.
Contact centers that prioritize advanced WFM tools and WEM solutions with artificial intelligence (AI) insights will quickly see benefits to agent performance.
- Automated, advanced scheduling tools and self-service options offer agents increased shift flexibility and work-life balance
- Agents empowered with access to complete information across all channels consistently provide optimal service. That means not only better CX through every interaction but more opportunities for agents to upsell.
- Empowered and engaged agents are more likely to communicate to leaders the problems they identify through their customer interactions. Their insights and customer intelligence are critical to optimizing CX.
Bonus: Here are five quick ways to boost agent employee engagement, productivity, and performance, and enhance the employee experience:
- Give contact center agents a purpose. Help them understand the big picture and achieve their true potential. Make sure they understand how their work connects to the company’s success. Map your agents’ performance goals to your business goals, and help agents understand how they align.
- Regularly offer agents feedback to help them understand how they are performing. Feedback should always be a mix of positive comments and opportunities to improve.
- Invest in training and coaching. Ongoing learning opportunities keep staff updated on industry trends, best practices, and customer service techniques.
- To keep agents engaged and productive, it’s important they feel heard. When contact center leaders listen to agents’ ideas and suggestions, it goes a long way toward improving customer service.
- Recognize individual agents and teams’ efforts and celebrate their successes. This goes a long way to boost morale, increase agent engagement, and reduce employee turnover.
For Customers
Customer-centric, omnichannel support makes navigating between touchpoints simple. Customers don’t want to repeat their problems every time they contact the help desk or customer service. WFM software delivers key benefits that positively enhance CX, customer engagements, and customer satisfaction::
- Agents have access to history and data to resolve issues quickly and effectively, providing a positive customer experience.
- Customers have the freedom to choose how to connect with you — whether by voice, email, chat, SMS, or social messaging — with omnichannel WFM solutions.
- Customers can personalize their support journey and have access to the right channels, self-service information, and agents or any combination — at the right time.
Choosing The Right WFM Tool
To gain an advantage in the digital business era, make sure that the WFM solution you choose can handle the requirements of omnichannel contact centers.
Upgrading to a comprehensive workforce management solution is advised once a contact center reaches a certain scale and needs to rely on data-driven decisions. Spreadsheets are no longer up to the task of scaling and handling multiple channel types because they simply take too much time. You also lose accuracy in handling the complexity of various work types, locations, talent management, employee performance, and agent preferences.
To elevate your operations and deliver omnichannel experiences you may want to consider Playvox WFM, a cloud-based solution with advanced features that’s built for digital channels for effective workforce management:
- Support the automated workflows required in digital communications
- Schedule concurrent work for channels such as email, web chat, and messaging
- Allow agents to vary the channel types they work on, increasing satisfaction and boosting employee productivity
- Tame complexity with AI-powered forecasting, scheduling, and intraday planning
- Gain a real-time view of planned versus actual scheduling for every location and work type
While these key features and capabilities are necessary for omnichannel contact center success, they are not available from traditional WFM vendors’ tools. That’s why we recommend you take a strategic approach to workforce management and make an informed decision to select solutions that allow your workforce to exceed the expectations of the digital customer. You’ll reach your ultimate destination — omnichannel success and sustained competitive advantage — much faster.
Ready to leverage WFM tools to optimize your omnichannel contact center? Download our eBook: 3 Key Areas For Digital Transformation In Your Contact CenterTo learn more about Playvox Workforce Management software tools for the modern contact center, request a demo.
