The hierarchy of needs in the modern contact center

The hierarchy of needs in the modern contact center

December 8, 2023

What does your contact center—your agents, evaluators, supervisors, and managers—need to succeed? We can take a page from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to understand today’s dynamic organization.

A widely accepted way of explaining human motivation and the prioritization of different needs, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theorizes that people are motivated to meet their needs hierarchically—they must satisfy lower-level needs (e.g., food and shelter) before they can move on to higher-level ones (e.g., security, self-esteem, and, ultimately, self-actualization).

In much the same way, we can think about the contact center’s needs as a hierarchy. At the bottom lies the need to have the right people in place, and this can be accomplished using workforce management (WFM) tools. Once that need is solved, contact center leaders can turn their attention to having the right people in place, and this is where quality management plays a key role. From here, leaders can move up the hierarchy to focus on employee engagement and delivering a great customer experience (CX).

In our recent eBook, we detailed how contact centers can move up the hierarchy of organizational needs. Satisfying the lowest need—having the right people in place—requires a three-pronged approach that can be facilitated by today’s modern WFM solutions:

  • Forecasting the right number of people: NICE CXone WFM leverages ongoing developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict contact trends and volumes, enabling workforce managers to determine proper staffing requirements.
  • Scheduling the right number of people: By balancing the demands of the business with employee demands for better work-life balance—all without human intervention—CXone WFM streamlines the scheduling process to keep your workforce agile and efficient.
  • Intraday management for the right number of people: NICE CXone WFM’s Intraday Manager helps ensure you are always ready to pivot, no matter what the day has in store.

Together, these features helps you ensure that you have the right number of people on hand, so you can move up the hierarchy of organizational needs to focus on quality. That’s where modern quality management solutions come in.

Quality management refers to the methods and tools used to ensure that your team's performance, business processes, and services meet the highest possible standards of excellence. Modern QM solutions enable you to:

  • Measure: CXone QM provides complete visibility into all interactions via a unified evaluation dashboard, allowing you to identify and monitor what works, what doesn't work, and what can be improved.
  • Evaluate: Contact center leaders can use CXone QM to pinpoint the most valuable evaluations, utilize flexible scoring or ranking, calibrate against existing evaluation forms or empty forms, dispute evaluations, and enable agent self-assessment.
  • Automate: CXone QM addresses manual quality management processes, enables automatic interaction distribution, and identifies areas for automation to optimize the customer journey.
  • Coach: Contact center leaders can leverage CXone QM to empower agents with focused, targeted coaching sessions, self-service learning tools, smart due dates, scheduling integration with WFM, and a dashboard for progress monitoring.

With CXone QM, you strike the perfect balance between operational requirements and employee empowerment while satisfying your quality needs, so you can turn your focus to the top two levels of needs in the organizational hierarchy—engaging employees and delivering a great CX.

NICE WFM and CXone QM are simply better together. NICE CXone WFM helps you evolve beyond the spreadsheet and manual staffing processes with advanced capabilities that power more robust forecasting, scheduling, and intraday management needs. CXone QM helps you motivate agents, target evaluator efforts for maximum impact, and optimize team performance under astute supervision. Together, they enable you to meet your organization’s needs to not only have the right number of people in place but also have the right people in place.

Read our Bringing workforce management and quality management together to engage employees and boost CX eBook to learn more about how WFM and QM lay the foundation for your organization to improve employee engagement and the customer experience.