Workforce Management Featured Article
The Customer Experience Needs to be Primary Focus in Workforce Management
The competitive landscape – it’s something the business leader has to assess when going into business and on an ongoing basis. You have to know what your competition is doing and stay abreast of the latest innovations so you don’t get left behind. But does having the latest and greatest mean you’ll stay ahead of the competition?
Consider the contact center. You may have the latest technology that ensures a customer’s call is immediately routed to the right agent who can deliver instant resolution. The call takes less than 30 seconds and is closed out in the system as a satisfactory interaction. The only problem is the customer didn’t have the opportunity to truly be heard and satisfaction for him did not take place.
In this example, the important element missing is the focus on the customer. Too many other companies offer the same thing, turning just about every product or service into a commodity. How do you stand out against the crowd and make yourself heard among so much noise? The key really is in the customer experience.
It’s been said so many times before that the customer experience seems almost akin to the latest buzzword. It gets a lot of attention, but doesn’t really have the meat needed to mean much of anything if there isn’t a strategy behind it. Customers will continue to purchase products and services from a company where they feel valued and that their voice is heard. If workforce management implementations don’t have the customer experience as a top priority, the company will likely spend too much time trying to replace customers who leave after unsatisfactory experiences.
To that end, the customer experience has to be so much more than just a buzzword in leading organizations. Workforce management solutions have to be selected according to the impact they will have on such experiences and contact center leaders need to reinforce the practices that support quality interactions. For instance, it may matter how much time the agent spends on the phone when it comes to key performance indicators (KPIs), but should the length of the call trump the quality of the interaction?
Taking it one step further, workforce management solutions are generally put in place so the contact center can effectively schedule according to forecasted volumes based on agent availability. The automated platforms help to reduce errors and allow supervisors to spend more time empowering agents and less time on manual processes. If such platforms are put in place without consideration for the customer experience, however, the ultimate outcome could easily miss the goal.
In short, the implementation of workforce management to support innovative practices in the contact center is a good idea, as long as it supports the strategic focus on the quality customer experience.
Edited by Maurice Nagle