What is Contact Center Workforce Optimization?
Contact center workforce optimization is the process of maximizing the quality and efficiency of a contact center's agent team by ensuring they are trained, supported, monitored, motivated and well scheduled. Good agents are a contact center's greatest asset. The service they deliver sets the tone for the customer experience. As with any asset, they need to be managed and developed thoughtfully to enable maximum performance. That's the goal of contact center workforce optimization.
Contact center workforce optimization is often facilitated by a set of technology solutions, which can include:
- Workforce management - Workforce management software performs the critical tasks of forecasting staffing needs and scheduling agents. It helps workforce managers ensure customer demands are met in the most labor efficient way. This is the heavy lifter of contact center workforce optimization tools.
- Quality monitoring - Quality monitoring tools record the contacts, provide the ability to assess the quality of the interaction, deliver agent coaching tools, and then provide reporting on quality and development results. Giving agents instant access to their quality scores, as well as requiring agent self-evaluations, can increase engagement and ownership.
- Performance management -Performance management systems help develop and engage agents by offering real time and historical dashboards for agents all the way to executives for instant visibility of performance against KPIs. Performance management also commonly includes gamification and social collaboration functionality.
Recording – Call recording is considered part of workforce optimization because without this functionality quality management can’t exist. Call recording captures the audio from customer interactions. Screen recording captures agent monitors during the interaction, providing insights related to agent process in order to amplify coaching beyond just the content of the conversation.
Contact center workforce optimization is an ongoing effort, made easier by automation. Contact centers who are committed to workforce optimization processes will experience higher agent engagement, better managed labor costs, and improved customer experience.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading call center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world. Our best-in-class tools support effective contactcenter workforce optimization. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its call (or contact) center operations.
NICE CXone Workforce Optimization unlocks your team’s potential by providing tools to inspire employee self-improvement, amplify quality to enhance customer experience, reduce labor waste, and ensure regulatory compliance. Patented technology powers the industry’s most intelligent forecasting, fosters employee ownership and accountability, and gives agents one experience across a cloud platform. As a natively developed suite, CXone WFO unifies workforce management, quality management, performance management and recording to deliver a better experience for agents, supervisors, and customers. With reduced effort and increased flexibility, you can achieve an optimal balance between operational efficiency and a superior customer service.
CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – solutions that empower agents and instill accountability, help achieve service levels at a lower cost, increase contact center efficiency, and revolutionize the customer experience. Essential to contact center workforce optimization efforts, these solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording, and performance management (PM). This is the engine many businesses use for their contact center workforce optimization efforts.
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic call center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.