Workforce Management Featured Article
December 12, 2014
Taking Control of the Customer Experience with Workforce Management
Whatever business a company engages in, its business with a potential customer starts at the first point of contact. This could be in person at a retail outlet, on the telephone in a contact center or via social media. Regardless of the channel, there is an opportunity there to make and keep a customer, or to drive a potential customer away, depending on how the contact is handled.
It’s vital, therefore, to ensure that when that all-important first contact happens (and subsequent contact after that), the right person is in place to speak to that customer. To modify the old expression about a chain only being as strong as its weakest link, a company’s customer support program is only as robust as its crabbiest agent. It may not be fair, but a company can offer nine great customer experiences and one lousy one, and the customer will remember only the lousy interaction. From there, it will take as many as a dozen positive experiences to make up for the poor one. And thanks to social media, customers today are not only willing, but eager, to broadcast their customer horror stories. You’re not only displeasing a single customer with a bad experience, you’re amusing (in a bad way) a few dozen or his or her friends.
It’s vital, therefore, to ensure that when that all-important first contact happens (and subsequent contact after that), the right person is in place to speak to that customer. To modify the old expression about a chain only being as strong as its weakest link, a company’s customer support program is only as robust as its crabbiest agent. It may not be fair, but a company can offer nine great customer experiences and one lousy one, and the customer will remember only the lousy interaction. From there, it will take as many as a dozen positive experiences to make up for the poor one. And thanks to social media, customers today are not only willing, but eager, to broadcast their customer horror stories. You’re not only displeasing a single customer with a bad experience, you’re amusing (in a bad way) a few dozen or his or her friends.
For this reason, ensuring the contact center is staffed with the right people in the right channels is possibly the most critical element of offering high quality customer support. Workforce management solutions that are robust, multichannel and flexible, allowing managers to make changes on the fly and receive alerts when operations are going out of alignment, are vital to a well-run contact center. These solutions, which often offer not only forecasting and scheduling, but real-time monitoring and schedule adherence, ACD integration, manager-agent collaboration, intraday management and more, can act as sentinels for call center quality and ensure that every time a customer makes contact, the best possible resources are available to him or her.
Rather than trying to make do with more manual methods, companies using modern workforce management can automate key tasks that will have an immediate impact on the bottom line through more accurate call volume forecasting, optimum scheduling and daily performance tracking. Thanks to cloud-based solutions such as Monet WFM, contact centers can be up and running quickly and begin improving service levels and reducing center costs without the high upfront expenses and IT requirements of traditional workforce management software or the limitations of scheduling spreadsheets.
Make sure that next time your customer calls, she isn’t being connected to the weakest link in your contact center. The quality of service she receives today will dictate whether she remains a customer in the future.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi