Effective workforce optimisation (WFO) could mobilise agents in a manner that they deliver the best possible CX and accrue a high CSAT rating. In fact, this was the top priority for WFO implementation as per a recent Verint report, ahead of the need to improve agent productivity. The number of companies focused on leveraging WFO for CX increased by 7 percentage points in two years, while those prioritising agent productivity decreased by 8 percentage points within the same period.
In other words, it’s no longer enough to keep your service levels high and your average handling time (AHT) very low. The quality of each experience, as reflected through CSAT scores, is what matters – and WFO is an essential ingredient to achieve this.
Understanding CSAT and Its Importance
Customer satisfaction or CSAT is a key performance metric across customer-facing functions, be it marketing, sales, support, or even customer success. According to the CMSWire State of Digital Customer Experience 2021 survey, CSAT is the second-most popular KPI for measuring CX (39%), after core business growth indices like revenue or renewals.
CSAT can be defined as a KPI that quantifies how satisfied a customer feels after making a purchase, using a product, or interacting with an agent, rated on a scale of 1-10 or 1-5. For contact centres, CSAT indicates:
- How well an agent performs during a voice, chat, or email session
- How seamlessly customers can use technology interfaces like self-service portals or webchat
An incorrectly configured WFO system could cause agent overburdening or too much idle time or even a customer-agent mismatch that will negatively impact your CSAT.
5 Tips to Course-correct
- Shorten queues with demand forecasts and predictive scheduling – This would ensure your agents are never overburdened and can serve customers to the best of their ability, addressing employee strain while also boosting CX
- Pay attention to customer data privacy concerns through QA – With speech analytics at play in a WFO setup, any/all vital or sensitive customer information is already redacted, so that customer data is safe, compliance is adhered to, and your agents don’t have to second guess with these often-complex regulations
- Analyse customer sentiment in real-time – Real-time customer sentiment analysis helps agents get a more organic and situational understanding of the state of the call, the mood of the customer, and they can quickly respond to the evolving conversation, or escalate the matter if needed
- Correlate CSAT data with agent performance (via call recordings) – Powered by CSAT data and error-proof call recordings, your performance and appraisal mechanism will now be without any bias or cognitive prejudice – letting the best come up through genuine contribution and allowing you to find and help the ones who need a little more hand-holding
- Upskill agents and adopt predictive routing – WFO lets you consistently upskill agents, addresses any challenges before they become a serious problem, and most importantly – assign the right agent to the call/customer request, based on a data science-led best-match system
