Do You Have to Choose Between Simulation and Digital Channel Support?

This blog is the seventh in a series on digital channel management. In the previous installment, we detailed WFM controls to meet the challenges posed by a digital world.

A customer service agent doesn’t simply go to work and pick up the phone in today’s digital world; he or she is just as likely to be chatting with a customer or two while responding to a social media post from someone else concurrently. It’s not just chat or social, either – many of the digital channels customers use to communicate with the businesses they do business with enable agents to handle multiple interactions concurrently, and session concurrency offers an efficiency benefit to contact centers. 

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not unlike the benefit offered by skills-based routing, which also helps optimize resources across the enterprise. Just as digital channels require a WFM solution enable to meet new complexities, skills-based routing can be difficult to manage without the appropriate tools.  

In short, skills-based routing involves dynamic routing that creates an interdependency between employee requirements and schedule creation. This interdependency is problematic for formula-based solutions that are only able to represent dependent and independent variables based on past experience. 

Simulation, however, can overcome those challenges with a framework designed to model the ever-changing interrelationships between customers, employees, skills, contact routing algorithms and management techniques. NICE’s Discrete Event Simulation is one solution that has proven itself to be able to mimic this complexity with superior results. 

The question, then, for workforce managers, is whether they have to choose between efficiency with simulation and support for digital channels. Simulation can allow a contact center to optimize employees with multiple skills, while digital channel support enables the contact center to optimize the number of concurrent sessions in which those multi-skilled employees interact. True optimization for the contact center should consider both; choosing simulation over digital channel support, or vice versa, will result in lost efficiency. 

The good news is that not all WFM solutions require workforce managers to choose between simulation and digital channel support. To stay competitive, businesses need a WFM solution that is ready for interactions that can go beyond the traditional. Learn more about NICE WFM with machine learning 2.0 for digital channel management.