Zoom has expanded its contact center portfolio by introducing Zoom Workforce Management.
The platform provides solutions across the workforce management (WFM) cycle, which has four stages. These are: forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and review.
At that final review stage, planners take learnings and apply those to their future plans, completing the cycle and ensuring continuous improvement.
Zoom has applied AI across the cycle to lighten the load on planners.
Moreover, as Ben Neo, Customer Experience Sales Leader at Zoom, tells CX Today:
Zoom’s WFM software is easy to use, intuitive, and reliable, and best of all is cloud-based to help customers scale up and down as their team evolves.
“This is another key element to further round out the Zoom Contact Center functionality and shows how we are reacting quickly to customer feedback.”
Interestingly, Neo also suggests that the platform will soon expand further, with Zoom Workforce Management the first offering within a wider Workforce Management Engagement (WEM) suite.
Alongside WFM tools, such suites often include contact center Quality Assurance (QA), gamification, and learning management solutions.
These will bring many further native capabilities to Zoom Contact Center customers.
Yet, first things first, let’s delve deeper into the core competencies of Zoom’s WFM platform.
Forecasting
The WFM platform ingests historical contact volume data directly from the Zoom Contact Center.
With this, planners may utilize the forecasting tool to automatically predict demand – four weeks at a time.
Alongside this forecasted demand, the solution may predict average handling time (AHT) across the same period and account for various metric targets – i.e., service level, target occupancy, etc.
After combining this information, planners can complete staffing calculations in just a few clicks.
Yet, they may also take the process to a more granular level by segmenting historical and forecasted traffic across various scheduling groups.
Finally, users can create unique forecasts for peak seasons and “what if” scenarios while making manual tweaks based on their own experience.
Here’s a sneak peek of the UI Zoom provides with its forecasting solution.
As Zoom expands the solution, the vendor may consider adding more forecasting models. The WFM team could then test the most accurate model for their environment.
Zoom may also drop in more channels as its CCaaS platform expands. Indeed, the offering currently supports voice and chat alone.
Scheduling
Taking data from the forecast, the Zoom Workforce Management solution generates recurring schedules, which account for agent contracts and preferences.
These are easily adjustable as contact center and agent’ needs change.
Moreover, schedulers may use dedicated modules to plan agent activities, optimize their breaks, and schedule different groups.
Still, many contact centers leverage messy spreadsheets to meet such needs. Zoom aims to support these operations in building more flexible schedules from one application.
Here’s a glimpse of the UI Zoom provides with its scheduling solution.
With these base capabilities, Zoom may soon consider adding a WFM app, which allows agents to hunt for shift swaps, request holidays, and change their preferences.
Intraday Management & Review
Zoom provides real-time and historical metric reporting to support intraday management initiatives and reviews.
Real-time coverage includes adherence monitoring. The feature shows agents who are out of adherence in increments of <one minute, one to five minutes, and >five minutes.
Managing this in real-time is critical for contact centers, as just one agent out of their seat increases the workload for everyone else.
In the WFM space, some refer to this principle as The Power of One Rule.
Below is a snapshot of the adherence report within the Zoom Workforce Management Platform.
Alongside such real-time metrics, planners may also check the accuracy of older forecasts, spot emerging trends, and factor these into their upcoming planning cycle.
Expect Zoom to track many more real-time and historical KPIs in the future, with schedule management capabilities also likely on the cards.
Such capabilities allow planners to offer overtime, switch agent activities, and reschedule events in just a matter of clicks.
The Start of a Workforce Engagement Suite
In two of the screenshots above, there is a category named “quality management” in the sidebar. That highlights how a move into QA is likely imminent for Zoom.
Such a shift will allow planners to improve schedules by using QA data to spot which agents best handle particular queries.
With this information, WFM teams may offer specific agents overtime when an unexpected barrage of a particular query hits the contact center. These are best-placed to maximize customer satisfaction and handle times.
In addition, planners may use QA data to isolate when specific agents perform at their best. Such insights support schedule creation and break-time optimization initiatives.
These opportunities are just two examples of many that come with integrating WFM and QA.
Moreover, such tactics allow planners to bolster customer, agent, and business outcomes. Indeed, they can now use their time for more than creating forecasts, building schedules, and navigating spreadsheets.
Third-Party WEM Suites Are Also Available
As Zoom expands its WEM suite, it will continue enhancing its WFM platform, perhaps adding more forecasting models, extra channels, and a scheduling app.
Yet, for businesses with such specialist capabilities high on their agenda, Zoom also integrates its CCaaS platform with WEM stalwarts – such as Calabrio and Verint.
These partners enable customers to centralize staff management across numerous sites, which may leverage different contact center providers.
To learn more about its Verint partnership – and Zoom’s other recent CX alliances – check out our article: Zoom Announces Several Partnerships to Strengthen Its CCaaS Platform
