Microsoft is building out a workforce engagement management (WEM) offering for its CCaaS platform: the Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
That’s according to its latest set of release notes, which introduce a “Microsoft WEM solution”.
WEM combines contact center workforce management (WFM) and quality assurance (QA).
Additionally, many providers will include conversational analytics, gamification, and learning management solutions within their WEM suites.
For now, Microsoft has only launched WFM tools as part of its “WEM Solution”. Yet, something much bigger seems to be in the works. Indeed, Microsoft writes:
[The] Microsoft WEM solution optimizes employee scheduling, performance, and engagement in customer service to enhance efficiency, service quality, and service representative satisfaction.
As such, expect the tech giant to soon pull together a more comprehensive offering, perhaps leveraging some of the existing QA capabilities strewn across its CCaaS platform.
Microsoft’s WFM Capabilities: The Lowdown
Upon its latest release, Microsoft covers the four fundamentals of contact center WFM: forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and review.
In terms of forecasting, the tech giant offers a capacity planning module for predicting staffing needs. Meanwhile, WFM teams may also create and analyze forecast scenarios. As such, they can plan for peak periods, holidays, and “what if” situations.
Additionally, the tech juggernaut provides “automated and manual” scheduling, filling in shift patterns that planners can build for themselves. Shift-swapping and the ability to manage time off are also critical features here.
In terms of intraday management, Microsoft has released real-time adherence monitoring. That pairs with its ability to review allocations, capacity, performance trends, and skills in “near-real-time”.
Lastly, Microsoft provides a “unified view of operations”, which offers historical reporting so WFM teams can understand the success of past capacity plans, gain learnings, and improve.
All these features provide Microsoft with a solid foundation for WFM – and soon WEM.
Giving his take on the release, Peter Ruiter, Deputy CTO of Digital Customer Experience at Capgemini & Microsoft MVP, wrote on LinkedIn:
These additions greatly add to the already feature-rich native Microsoft CCaaS platform, making it a very appealing option for organizations considering shifting their WEM into the new platform.
Ruiter also stressed that Dynamics 365 customers can integrate with third-party WEM/WFM solutions.
In doing so, they can centralize reporting across contact center locations that utilize different core contact center platforms. They may also leverage a more robust feature set.
However, with the Microsoft WEM Solution, many smaller customers – with fewer WFM requirements – can start to converge systems and reduce costs.
Microsoft’s Next Steps in WEM
While Microsoft may not have yet packaged its QA features as part of a formalized WEM solution, it is actively innovating on this front.
For starters, it offers a closed conversation form, which allows service reps to view recordings and transcripts at the end of a conversation.
Moreover, Microsoft offers a Conversation Journey card that collects additional sentiment insights, “key” metrics, an AI summary, and post-contact survey results from each interaction.
Both reps and supervisors can leverage this information, while the latter can get more granular, with metrics covering call duration for each conversation segment, number of transfers, etc.
With this insight, supervisors can inform QA evaluations, pinpointing the conversations that will likely yield the best learning opportunities.
Soon, Microsoft may – given its agentic AI capabilities – pre-configure an AI agent that not only automatically scores these customer conversations but also extracts key learnings from conversations for prescriptive coaching.
Indeed, the pieces are almost there. Soon, Microsoft will likely assemble them into one coordinated WEM platform and further its charge in the CCaaS market.
