Boost Call Center Performance via Better Management
June 10, 2014
It’s an age-old question in contact centers: do you train your agents to be all things to all customers, and possess at least moderate skill in all communications channels and with all types of customers? Or do you emphasize their strengths and allow them to focus on the tasks and channels they excel in, leaving other channels and transactions to other agents who excel in those areas?
While there is something to be said for both methods – agents allowed to do what they excel in will be happier in their jobs and more effective, but they may become bored and disengaged without a variety of work – it helps to ensure that the contact center infrastructure is able to track, monitor and measure agent performance with certain channels and specific customer types.
In a recent white paper, contact center solutions provider inContact introduces its newest solution, what it calls the “Workforce-Intelligent Contact Center.” The integrated solution can do just that: sense and track agent performance according to channel and transaction type. It reports individual KPIs, QM scores, and e-learning ratings, then adjusts skilling and prioritized call routing to help optimize agent performance.
“Perhaps an agent excels with VIPs and performs much better via phone than chat,” write the white paper’s authors. “The Workforce-Intelligent Contact Center knows this and proactively prioritizes that agent’s calls, helping increase productivity and quality of service. When agents are focused on what they do best, they have standout moments of high engagement and job satisfaction.”
The ultimate goal is to eliminate the common disconnection between workforce optimization and contact center infrastructure systems, a problem that plagues many, if not most, contact centers today. In doing so, companies can cut operating costs and minimize capital expenditures (given the nature of hosted solutions); optimize workforce performance, efficiency, and quality; reduce the time spent managing complex solutions; improve customer experiences, retention, loyalty, and share of wallet; and increase revenue. Attaining these goals is virtually impossible with a contact center infrastructure that simply pushes data to the workforce optimization system for scheduling and call monitoring, but goes no further in monitoring and managing it.
To help contact centers learn the potential of an intelligent workforce optimization solution fully integrated with the contact center, inContact will be sponsoring a Web event titled, “Harnessing Performance Management to Elevate the Contact Center.” The webinar, which will take place on Wednesday, June 18, at 2 p.m. (EDT), will help attendees learn about how performance management processes have evolved to more fully engage employees and customers. The presenters will discuss how contact centers can cost-effectively serve customers better by leveraging workforce optimization tools to track KPIs and monitor/rectify performance issues and identify gaps in performance management and create actionable steps to address them.
For more information or to register, visit the Webinar’s information page.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson