Workforce Management Featured Article
WFM: If Price Scares You Away, the Cost of Doing Nothing Should Make You Want to Stay
What is your motivation for investigating or investing in workforce management solutions? Are you trying to improve convenience? Have you seen demonstrated efficiency gains? Is there a bump in customer satisfaction as your service quality has improved? There’s a number of common reasons why call centers invest in their workforce, including the impact on labor costs. If this hasn’t been your focus in the past, let’s take a look at why it’s worth consideration today.
A recent blog post by workforce management solutions provider, Monet Software (News - Alert), examined this benefit at length. One key area of concern for a number of call centers are the costs that expand beyond the hourly wage. Businesses are continually struggling to keep pace with the industry and competitive pressures to provide flexible schedules and shifts, leading to overtime. Even when going beyond the boundaries of the budget, managers see it as an unavoidable cost of doing business.
When focused on the customer experience and changing market demands, it’s easy to get caught up in the activities of the call center and lose track of the details that must be managed to keep costs and overages in check. Workforce management allows call center managers detailed insight into agent schedules and labor issues, enabling them to proactively minimize overtime and trigger alerts when overtime thresholds are getting closer. This allows supervisors to take the necessary actions to prevent overtime, without sacrificing quality customer interactions.
The added costs is often one of the key reasons smaller call centers don’t invest in workforce management solutions. Whenever there is a large upfront capital requirement, it’s easy to set aside such solutions, placing priority on the software and hardware needed to meet everyday demands. Fortunately, the availability of workforce management in the cloud makes the cost much more manageable. At the same time, it delivers added savings throughout the organization.
Consider the administrative costs you can save if you no longer need to manually schedule your employees. With more accurate schedules, you can also lower the cost of overstaffing and keep your morale at a higher level. If an agent needs to be gone due to illness or training, you gain instant insight into availability so as to minimize the loss in productivity. Real-time monitoring also ensures you have better schedule adherence among the agent base, keeping labor costs in check.
The key to making a smart decision when it comes to workforce management is to consider the cost of standing still. If you’re concerned about scheduling, the cost of labor and overtime getting out of hand, it’s time to take a closer look at workforce management in the cloud. If it doesn’t prove to reduce your cost of operation, improve efficiency and streamline operations, simply stop using it. Chances are, once you’re up and running, you won’t want to.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi