Contact centres are the front line of customer service and satisfaction. They handle customer interactions through different communication channels, such as phone, email, chat, social media, etc. To provide excellent customer service, contact centres must efficiently manage their workforce. This is when workforce management tools become helpful in contacting centres operate smoothly.
What is Workforce Management?
Workforce management is managing and scheduling employees efficiently. It ensures that the correct number of agents with the right skills are scheduled at the right time to handle customer interactions across all channels.
Some of the critical aspects of Workforce Management include:
- Forecasting: Predicting the volume and type of customer contacts based on historical data, trends, seasonality, and other factors.
- Scheduling: Assigning agents to shifts and breaks based on availability, preferences, skills, and forecasted workload.
- Monitoring: Tracking the performance and adherence of agents in real-time and taking corrective actions if needed.
- Coaching: Providing feedback and training to agents to improve their skills, knowledge, and motivation.
- Reporting: Analysing and evaluating the results and outcomes of Workforce Management activities and identifying areas for improvement.
How Workforce Management Tools Can Help Contact Centers
Workforce management tools are specialised software applications that automate and improve different Workforce Management processes. This can help contact centre workforce management to achieve the following benefits:
- Enhance customer experience: Workforce Management tools can help contact centres align customer needs with available agents, decreasing customer wait times, dropped calls, and transferred calls. They can also ensure the same quality of service on various channels and platforms, which increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Improve agent engagement: Workforce Management tools can help contact centres give their agents more control over their schedules, preferences, and goals. They can also help contact centres and acknowledge and encourage their agents’ accomplishments, creating a positive work environment and culture.
- Increase operational efficiency: Workforce Management tools can help contact centres reduce costs by maximising resource efficiency and balancing staff levels. They can also help contact centres improve productivity and quality by analysing performance and processes. Know more about Change the Way you Approach Workforce Analytics.
How to Implement Workforce Management Tools in Your Contact Centre
Once you have chosen the right tools for managing your workforce, you must implement them properly to ensure their success. You need to follow these steps to implement tools for managing your workforce in your customer service centre.
- Prepare your contact centre: Define your Workforce Management goals, objectives, metrics, and Key performance indicators. Assess your current workforce management processes, challenges, and gaps. Identify your workforce management stakeholders, roles, and responsibilities. Communicate your Workforce Management vision, strategy, and plan to your employees.
- Configure your Workforce Management tools: Adapt your Workforce Management tools to meet the needs, preferences, and rules of your contact centre. Connect your Workforce Management tools with your existing systems, platforms, and data sources. Test your Workforce Management tools for functionality, accuracy, and reliability.
- Train your employees: Educate your employees about the benefits, features, and functions of your workforce management tools. Provide them with practical training, assistance, and instructions on how to use your workforce management tools effectively. Please encourage them to share their thoughts, suggestions, and questions on your workforce management tools.
- Monitor and evaluate your Workforce Management tools: Track and measure your Workforce Management tools’ performance, impact, and outcomes. Analyse the data, reports, and insights generated by your Workforce management tools. Identify the advantages and disadvantages of your Workforce Management tools. Adjust and improve your Workforce Management tools as needed.
How to Optimise Your Contact Centre Performance with Workforce Management Tools
More than implementing Workforce Management tools in your contact centre is required to optimise your performance. You must also use your Workforce Management tools strategically and continuously to achieve your desired results. To optimise your contact centre performance with Workforce Management tools, you need to go through the following approach:
- Align your Workforce Management tools with your contact centre goals and objectives: Ensure that your Workforce Management tools are aligned with your contact centre’s vision, mission, values, and culture. Ensure your Workforce Management tools support your contact centre service level, quality, cost, revenue, and other goals and objectives.
- Leverage the power of AI and ML in your Workforce Management tools: Use the AI and ML capabilities of your Workforce Management tools to enhance your forecasting, scheduling, assigning, and managing processes. Use your Workforce Management tools’ AI and ML capabilities to automate, optimise, and personalise your Workforce Management decisions and actions.
- Engage your employees with your Workforce Management tools: Empower them with flexibility, autonomy, and control over their schedules and assignments. Motivate your employees with recognition, rewards, and incentives for their performance and achievements. Involve your employees in your Workforce Management tools’ feedback, improvement, and innovation.
- Delight your customers with your Workforce Management tools: Deliver consistent, reliable, and high-quality service to your customers across all channels and touchpoints. Meet or exceed your customers’ expectations and needs with timely, accurate, and relevant responses and solutions. Create memorable customer experiences with personalised, empathetic, and proactive interactions.
Popular Workforce Management Tools in 2023
Workforce management tools are software applications that help contact centres automate and streamline workforce management processes. Workforce management tools can help contact centres with various tasks, such as forecasting, scheduling, assigning, and managing. Workforce management tools can also provide contact centres with valuable insights and analytics to help them make informed decisions and improve their strategies.
Some of the popular workforce management tools call centres are:
- ProHance: It is a cloud-based solution that optimises workforce processes through powerful real-time analytics. ProHance workplace analytics and operations enablement platform that provides actionable insights for more intelligent decisions in complex, distributed and hybrid workforces. ProHance helps you to engage with your distributed workforce and ensure their wellness and productivity, provide workforce-related analytics and enhance employee awareness for better performance, and optimise your IT assets and work distribution and management with workflow, partner ecosystem management and new age operations management platform.
- Time Master: Time Master is a cloud-based solution that helps contact centres with forecasting, scheduling, monitoring, reporting, and analytics. Time Master uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate accurate forecasts based on historical and real-time data. Time Master also allows agents to access their schedules online or via mobile devices.
- Clockify: This software application helps contact centres with time tracking, attendance tracking, payroll processing, invoicing, and reporting. Clockify allows agents to log their hours worked on different projects or tasks using a simple interface. Clockify also automates the calculation of wages based on different rates or rules.
Conclusion
Contact centres need workforce management tools to enhance their operations and performance. These tools play a role in forecasting, scheduling, assigning and overseeing agents while providing insights and analytics to support decision-making. ProHance empowers contact centres to engage with their dispersed workforce effectively, offers analytics related to workforce management, optimises IT resources and workload allocation and efficiently manages partner collaborations. Adopting ProHance contact centres can significantly improve customer experiences, boost agent productivity levels, reduce costs, increase revenue generation capabilities and foster better employee engagement. ProHance is a powerful and innovative solution supporting contact centres’ complex and challenging workforce management process.
