Gaining Visibility and Improving Agent Performance

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  A centuries-old saying that is a perfect allegory to today’s modern contact center.  Agents that are engaged and understand the impact of their contributions are a must have in the organizational journey to deliver superior customer experience.  In order to realize meaningful results all agents must have a stake in the game and understand their importance to that journey. 

Jeff Kennon, Director of Customer Experience for NeoNova, a customer support enterprise servicing some of the world’s leading internet service and telecom providers, says that leveraging a workforce management platform helped delight both customers and agents. He explains how opening new channels has made for a great customer experience.

But it’s not just the agents that play such a critical role.  It’s the contact center manager.  Afterall, the contact center manager is a leader that is helping shape their agents by understanding each of their agents strongest skillsets and weakest skillsets.  These assessments have historically been a thankless and imperfect science where managers and supervisors lacked the ability to see broadly how the agents were performing in relation to the rest of the team.

It is even more difficult as new channels and user preferences emerge in the contact center landscape.  In a legacy “call center,” limited visibility may still have proven difficult in stack ranking performance but it was doable.  Through the explosion of the digital channel where people are engaging contact center agents through social, chat and email, it has become increasingly difficult if not impossible to have a true view of team performance using legacy ‘call center’ tools.

Workforce Management / Workforce Optimization solutions deliver dashboard data in real time to contact center mangers.  Modern workforce management allows supervisors to set daily and weekly schedules and rules.  For instance, when can an agent take a break and how does that impact the other agents? 

Using Quality Management and Workforce Management tools allows contact center supervisors to have a full 360-degree view of the team operation.  What’s more, modern contact center tools allow supervisors to establish what their KPI’s are.  For instance, no one should be on hold for longer than 30 seconds, no one should be waiting in a chat queue for longer than 60 seconds. 

Modern systems, like NICE’s Workforce Management solutions, will then do the scheduling ‘for’ the supervisor.  In essence saying, “you need to achieve 30 second hold times for voice and 60 seconds for chat, based on your average volume you need this many agents active at all times.”  It will then intelligently stagger breaks across your team to ensure that the KPI’s are kept.  This is a quantum leap over legacy tools.

Lastly, the agents need to know they have a stake in the game too.  Afterall, they will make or break your ability to stay on target for KPI’s and SLA’s.  A user intuitive tool that shows the agent how they are performing relative to the team in a tremendous incentive and one that be fun for teams, through team competitions.  Today’s tools are light years ahead of their predecessors, giving supervisors the visibility into team performance and operation and giving agents a true view of how they are performing among their peers. 

We spoke with Jeff Kennon, Director of Customer Experience for NeoNova, who Jeff shared his views on how using Workforce Management has helped him build a best practice for his contact center to uplevel user experience and agent engagement. Learn more about the impact of opening new communications channels on Neo Nova.