The contact centre workforce is at the heart of any CX agenda. Optimal workforce utilisation helps you cater to the largest possible customer base. By motivating your agents, you can drive up the quality of service experiences. Compliant workforce processes are essential for maintaining CX quality and regulatory adherence.
The tools and infrastructure systems that help contact centre managers achieve all of this come within the purview of workforce optimisation (WFO).
What Is Workforce Optimisation? Definition and Components
You can define workforce optimisation or WHO as the set of tools, processes, and strategies that aim to maximise the potential of contact centre agents while maintaining work-life balance, in order to achieve industry/organisational standards in efficiency, productivity, quality and compliance.
WFO in a contact centre has the following components:
- Recording and quality management – Used to record agent-customer interactions to ensure compliance with consumer data protection laws and organisational standards of service quality
- Workforce management (WFM) – Used to plan optimal staffing patterns so that the contact centre isn’t understaffed or overstaffed during peak and low demand periods
- Performance management – Used to identify performance issues for specific agents and offer training, incentivisation, or gamification to bring about improvements
- Customer analytics – Used to unearth deeper insights into customer interactions, their mood, requirements, etc. to match with the perfect agent
- Business intelligence – Used to generate reports on the efficiency and performance of contact centre agents to get buy-in/sponsorship from organisation leaders
Broadly, WFO tools and processes help achieve these above five functions. Sophisticated technologies like AI or predictive analytics go a long way in strengthening WFO, helping contact centres achieve more with fewer resources.
How Does Workforce Optimisation Impact CX?
Given that it is your agents who are driving the customer experience (no matter the technologies and automations at play), it makes sense that WFO would have a strong correlation with CX quality. A survey asked contact centre managers if they were happy with the customer experience they provide. Among those who said that they were happy or very happy (70%), their primary reasons had to do with workforce optimisation.
53% said it was because of sufficient and balanced staffing that they were able to provide a CX they were happy with. 45% attributed it to effective agent coaching/training.
There are several reasons why WFO would have an outsized influence on CX:
● It ensures that there are enough agents to attend to the call queue, reducing the wait time for customers
● It equips agents with the information and training they need to solve customer problems at the very first interaction
● It reduces the risk of overburdening agents, and happier agents mean happier customers
● It identifies possibilities for self-service implementation (through analytics); this reduces the call load and agents can devote more time to each interaction
● Gamification, which is an important element of WFO in outbound settings, motivates agents to deliver a more engaging CX so as to increase conversion
That’s why contact centres are intent on doubling down on their WFO investments, which already grew from $1.8 billion in 2018 to $2.6 billion in 2019, on track to reach $9.3 billion by 2025.
