What is workforce optimization (WFO)?
WFO meaning workforce optimization is the name given to a set of different yet related processes, and the contact center technologies enabling them, that aim to optimize and maximize employee productivity and efficiency within the contact center.
To embark on WFO means to strategically apply different elements of optimization to ensure you get the most out of the human resources of your call center. Those elements include:
- Workforce management (WFM)
- Quality management (QM)
- Interaction analytics
- Performance dashboards and gamification (adding gaming elements to processes)
We’ll expand on these later.
How does WFO work in a call center?
Workforce optimization in a contact center is not a simple, standalone process. It's best looked at as an ecosystem of activities aimed at helping different aspects of your contact center to work together better. With the right WFO contact center software solutions, you can bring all those strands together, maximize the performance and efficiency of your workforce, and therefore help them to provide the best customer experience.
Benefits of the right contact center workforce optimization solutions
The right contact center workforce optimization solutions include features to help you with all the elements of WFO we mentioned earlier (and which we’re going to cover in more depth soon). By keeping you on top of WFM, QM, interactions analytics, and performance monitoring, they’ll help you to :
Reduce operational costs
Use AI-driven scheduling to maximize coverage and so reduce long hold times and call abandonment while minimizing agent idle time.
Improve customer experience
From your past customer interactions, you'll be able to communicate better. You can achieve this not only through finding opportunities to improve employee performance but also seeing how other aspects of your contact center, like proper employee scheduling, can increase customer satisfaction.
Boost agent engagement
Agent turnover is a challenge many contact center leaders face each day. Effective WFO helps keep your agents engaged and motivated to perform better. Happy agents lead to happy customers.
Enhance contact center operations
WFO provides detailed insights for you to monitor, understand, and proactively address customer needs. From identifying customer sentiment to the top areas of frustration, WFO can help you make better decisions.
The main elements of WFO & how contact center workforce optimization software helps with each
As we’ve mentioned more than once, there are—broadly speaking—four main elements of WFO in the contact center:
- Workforce management (WFM)
- Quality management (QM)
- Interaction analytics
- Performance management and gamification
Let’s take a closer look at each in turn, and explain the key features of workforce optimization software you’ll need to excel in all these areas:
What is workforce management (WFM)?
Workforce management (WFM) refers to the processes that contact centers use to build agent schedules, manage timelines, and empower agents by making life easier for them, while maximizing their skill sets to increase productivity.
It's also about providing customers a consistent experience whenever they contact you, regardless of channel, including:
- Answering inbound calls and messages within a consistent time frame
- Providing the same level of expertise on every call as much as possible
On the flip side, it’s about increasing agent occupancy to keep your labor costs efficient. Any amount of time agents are not serving customers is a cost. WFM helps provide accurate forecasting and proper scheduling of agents.
How the right contact center technology helps with workforce management
In the past, attendance software was more straightforward because agents only handled one type of call. Agents could be assigned to billing, customer service, directory assistance, or technical support, but not many could handle more than one or two types of calls. As a result, human resources had an easier time. They just needed to consider when different types of calls came in and schedule most of their qualified agents on those shifts.
Contact centers have evolved since then. Today's agents may handle multiple types of issues from simple account queries to complex billing queries. They’re expected to address these issues on different channels including calls, email, and chat. On top of that, they’re expected to build a relationship with customers. Contact center managers and workforce analysts need to have a deeper understanding of their workforce's numerous skills and their customers’ behavior to know how to schedule agent shifts properly.
Fortunately, WFM tools built into more holistic contact center workforce optimization technology can help your contact center figure it out with ease. These include:
Instead of complicated spreadsheets that you build manually, your workforce management software should include the ability to accurately forecast based on historical data.
With agents having multiple skills, you must be able to assign them to a schedule that will maximize these skills, while decreasing the chances they’ll receive calls they're not equipped to handle. Having a tool that defines your agents' skills, like who are the agents who can handle both chat and calls, is critical to proper scheduling.
What’s the use of a proper schedule when your agents aren’t following it? Get a workforce management solution that has a robust, real-time adherence tracking feature for time and attendance to hold your agents accountable.
There will be times when your planned schedule will conflict with the plans of your agents. Empower your workforce with the flexibility of being able to trade shifts with people who share the same skill set and have a say in their preferred schedule.
What is quality management (QM)?
In any business, you want to provide consistent quality in your products and services. It’s no different in contact centers. You want to provide your customers with great agent interaction every time they call or otherwise reach out.
Quality management refers to the set of processes and workflows in contact centers whereby the quality assurance (QA) team reviews and monitors customer interactions to ensure that each one is up to the standards expected from the company.
How the right contact center technology helps with quality management
Good quality monitoring and management tools equip your QA team to easily and effectively review the quality of actual calls, and so provide the right feedback and coaching.
Some of the hallmarks of the best QM tools are that they:
Traditional quality management tools were built with large enterprises in mind, who have thousands of agents and dedicated staff to set up and manage them. However, a large segment of businesses need a quality management tool that is available out of the box. The best QM tools today are quick to implement and have a shallow learning curve.
If you already have an existing QA process, you need the ability to customize evaluation forms to review the work of your agents. You want these forms to be customizable because the way you evaluate agents will inevitably evolve as better tools, technology, and strategies come up. You also want the ability to have these scorecards automatically reviewed by AI to reduce the workload for supervisors or QA teams.
The QA team should be able to easily identify the agents they want to monitor or review, the call they want to listen to, and summaries and key insights.
What is interaction analytics?
Interaction analytics, also referred to as conversation intelligence or conversation analytics, is the tracking and analysis of both voice and non-voice interactions (SMS, live chat, email, and social media) with customers. It can include identifying common complaints or compliments from callers, call disposition, and sentiment analysis to drill down into how customers are feeling. Effective interaction analytics helps you be proactive in your service offering, better coach and train agents, and more
How the right contact center technology helps with interaction analytics
Top organizations are continuously looking for the latest interaction analytics and reporting technology to help them stay ahead of the curve.
With day-to-day operations growing more complex than ever, your interaction analytics tools should be flexible enough to keep pace. Some of the essential functions you need to future-proof your organization are:
Traditional measurements of customer satisfaction depended on manual post-interaction surveys, which can be hit or miss. An interaction analytics solution should be able to identify customer sentiment on every call to give you a complete, unbiased view of CSAT.
Each company has key words and phrases they want to track. Whether it’s a phrase for a requested action (“Refund” for example), a competitor mention, or a product name, understanding how often these topics occur is a critical feature.
Understanding how your agents respond to objections by your customer can help identify best (or worst) practices to use in training. The key causes of customer frustration should also be easily understood, so your business can improve the products, services, and processes that lead to customer issues.
What is performance management?
Performance management is the name given to the processes you use to help assess and boost agent motivation and morale. By introducing gamification, performance management helps promote a sense of friendly competition between agents to incentivize better performance.
What to look for in a performance management solution
What you want from performance management features is the ability to combine call data and other contact statistics with other aspects of the contact center. That may include customer accounts, customer relationship management (CRM) software, or other back-end data that will give insight into how your operations are impacting your revenue.
Some of the functionality you want in the area of performance management includes:
Data collection should be automated, so the latest information is always available without manual extraction. It not only allows for faster reporting and analysis, but it also reduces mistakes and errors commonly associated with manual data extraction.
You can create a tier of achievements where agents can earn badges by reaching each tier. These badges or ribbons are virtual representations of their accomplishments and the organization's recognition of those same accomplishments.
Agents can compete for top rank on specific performance metrics, like who has the best call handle time, who can get the most feedback from customer surveys, or who has the best QA metrics overall.
Maximizing the effectiveness of WFO with modern contact center solutions
As with most contact center-related technologies, on-premises setups used to be the only option for deployment of WFO solutions. This made it difficult—not to mention cost prohibitive—for many organizations to truly focus on workforce optimization.
Cloud technology, however, has drastically improved how workforce optimization solutions are deployed. Providers like RingCentral can now offer businesses a whole suite of WFO tools—all as part of a holistic cloud contact center solution.
When you power your contact center with RingCentral RingCX, you don’t just get the full breadth of capabilities from telephony and call routing functions to collaboration and analytics. You also get all of the WFO capabilities you need to deliver business goals, in the areas of WFM, QM, interaction analytics, and performance management. All without the complexity of dealing with—and paying for—multiple providers.