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We are all aware of the challenges and stresses associated with a Customer Success team or a customer relationship center. It is necessary to establish schedules and forecasts, manage key performance indicators and budgets, and satisfy customers.
With developments that have transformed the way many people work and consume services, the task may seem even more complex. You can quickly be overwhelmed by a deluge of information, and it can seem impossible to manage your team effectively.
Fortunately, there is a solution that can help you overcome these challenges: workforce management optimization (WFO). It can help improve team productivity and customer service, while saving money.
Ready to reduce your stress levels and raise your standards? This article defines and highlights the importance of workforce management optimization. It explains how to implement this strategy and how to choose the right workforce management software. All in order to improve agent performance and operational efficiency within your customer relationship team.
What is the optimization of workforce management?
Workforce Management Optimization (WFO) is a collection of strategies, processes, and technologies. This concept focuses on improving customer satisfaction, operational costs, workforce planning, and other key metrics. Its purpose is to obtain the best performance from your agents and to improve customer service.
In summary, WFO involves automating processes to increase productivity, optimizing technology investments, and providing data and analytics to provide a detailed view of all aspects of an organization. In call centers, for example, optimizing staff management aims to improve workforce management and agent performance.
What is workforce optimization in a customer relationship center?
As mentioned above, the optimization of workforce management aims to improve and simplify processes. The aim is to help organizations meet the challenges they face.
In customer relationship centers (CRCs), these challenges manifest themselves in a very specific way. For example, by using built-in software features that solve common problems and improve customer service.
Let's take the example of flow forecasting using machine learning. The aim is to use artificial intelligence to predict expected flows as reliably as possible, at a time interval of up to a quarter of an hour! This technology then makes it possible to effectively predict schedules to cover expected flows.
Customer relationship centers can also use the optimization of staffing. The objective is simple: optimize employee schedules to use as little as possible external alternatives, which are often expensive, or overtime.
Here are a few examples of how customer relationship centers are using technology. They streamline their operations in a WFO strategy in order to improve customer service and optimize the skills of their staff.
Why is workforce management optimisation important?
Implementing a WFO strategy allows your customer relationship team to increase the efficiency of all of your operations. It is based on various tools and integrated technologies that work as a unified platform.
An effective WFO solution can bring numerous benefits to your customer relationship center: savings, loyalty, and improved customer experience.
Improving customer experience and retention
Customer service plays a crucial role in the positive representation of your brand and the success of your organization. Today's customers are more discerning and demanding, and have plenty of ways to express their discontent, especially on social media. According to a 2019 Microsoft report, 58% of customers will not return to a business after a single unsatisfactory experience.
WFO allows you to improve customer service by providing you with information about past customer interactions, allowing you to effectively anticipate future flows.
By using new tools to make planning easier and improving agent performance, your center can dramatically improve customer satisfaction and retention.
Improving agent efficiency and customer relationship center productivity
Staff is one of the biggest expenses in most call centers. However, having too few agents can exhaust your team and frustrate your customers, while too many agents lead to overspending.
Staff optimization helps you find the right balance by maximizing employee productivity. It also allows you to manage flows in different departments using a single platform, thus improving the overall performance of your center and your agents.
Increased savings
An effective workforce optimization strategy will contribute to create a stronger and more confident team of agents.
Finding the right balance between overstaffing and understaffing can reduce turnover and the possibility of losing money due to poor customer service. Here's why your customer support team should adopt a customer-centric culture.
What are the components of workforce optimization software?
We have posited that workforce management optimization is a multi-faceted subject. It aims to maximize the skills of your staff to ensure that your customers are well taken care of.
But what does that mean exactly? There are several key components that all customer support centers use to build the foundations of their WFO platform, and here's what you need to know about each of them:
Workforce Management
Simply put, workforce management is the use of technology, strategy, and processes to optimize productivity. Call centers use this integrated approach to accurately predict and schedule agents correctly, which helps optimize operations.
By replacing outdated spreadsheets with effective team planning software that takes advantage of automation, you'll be in a position to optimize team planning.
But also to easily develop more accurate forecasts, to monitor your SLAs and key performance indicators in real time, and much more. The good news is that there are plenty of HR management software options out there. Here are some important characteristics to consider when evaluating:
- Creation of accurate forecasts. With these forecasts, your agents will be ready at the right time. The right forecasts lead to the right workforce levels, which in turn makes it possible to set the right schedules. For the greatest satisfaction of your customers and your agents.
- Effective planning tools. High-quality workforce management software will use automation to help you quickly create schedules. It will help you offer competency-based schedules and allow team members to complete tasks such as self-scheduling or team exchange.
- Real-time grip control. To know if your planning is effective, it is essential that it be monitored by the agents. Adherence makes it possible to measure the difference between the forecast and the tasks actually carried out to manage the activity.
- Clear dashboards. Analyzing historical data helps identify patterns, skills to refine, and trends in inquiries. Make sure your workforce management software provides easy access to the data you need. This will allow you to easily track the performance of your customer support and improve agent productivity.
Quality management
Customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal of any contact center. The team responsible for quality management (QM) or quality assurance (QA) therefore ensures that the SLA goals are not only met, but also exceeded as far as possible.
In a support team, the quality management software periodically checks calls and other forms of communication to ensure that standards are met. From an analytical perspective, the software will also review historical reports to ensure that calls are handled efficiently and on time.
Other features that quality management software should have include:
- Interface. Your tools should be easy to use and easy to customize. If you have other systems in place, look for a platform that can be integrated to save time.
- Customizable settings. Not all organizations, teams, and even agents are the same. You need access to tools that can adapt to the needs and key performance indicators of your team, as well as to agents and their skills.
Customer interaction metrics
According to a recent study, more than two-thirds of customer relationship centers are considering investing in advanced workforce management optimization software.
The reason for this search for data is simple: it can help improve almost every aspect of call center operations, from customer interaction metrics to real-time management.
While call centers have never run out of data, they have always had trouble interpreting it in a useful way. Analytics tools solve this problem by quickly and effectively analyzing customer interaction data in order to compare a center's performance with its goals.
How to take advantage of optimizing staff management
We explained what workforce optimization is. Now, let's see how you can make the most of this process in your customer relationship today.
- A customer-focused strategy. Ensure that your overall goals and daily activities are focused on customer satisfaction. This should be a top priority. Be open to change. The aim of workforce management optimization is to help you adapt to the changing industry and to constantly improve.
- Time management and attendance monitoring. Knowing how your team members organize their time can help you eliminate unnecessary processes and ensure that your agents focus on the tasks that matter most. Attendance monitoring allows you to guarantee the coverage of your needs and an optimal organization.
- Scheduling. Careful planning ensures that the most qualified people are assigned to the teams that need them the most, while ensuring that employees don't feel burned out. The right schedule is one that meets the needs of your customers and agents.
- Monitoring of performances and tasks. With the right tools, it's easy to track schedules and tasks, and determine when agents need training or refresher. With these key practices, you can make the most of workforce optimization and improve your customer experience with every interaction.
Learn what it takes to go beyond human resource management and optimize the workforce. To find out more, click here!
How to choose human resources optimization software
When considering investing in a workforce management platform, it's important to find a system that fits the way your customer relationship team works. Identify the components that are most important to your current and future business.
Your workforce optimization software should allow you to access all of these areas within a unified platform, so you can spend more time optimizing your center's operations. Otherwise, you risk spending your time re-entering information from one tool to another. Here are some additional tips to keep in mind when choosing the software that's right for you:
- Make sure the user interface is ergonomic.
- Make sure it can adapt to your business and services.
- Confirm that it can easily be integrated with the tools currently in use.
A giant in the consumer goods industry used m-work to optimize its staffing and increase its service levels by 15%! Find out how here.
Ensure operational efficiency with staffing optimization software
In short, today's consumers are well-informed, demanding, and have become more difficult to satisfy.
Prioritizing the implementation of a planning optimization strategy will help you meet the growing needs of your customers.
Optimizing staff management should improve the customer experience by boosting productivity, increasing efficiency, and improving agent performance.
The m-work software creates accurate forecasts that allow you to segment planning by type of flow (telephone, emails...) or skill. It also takes advantage of automation to instantly build schedules at scale. It also collects real-time and historical data so you can train agents on an ongoing basis.
m-work is easy to deploy: cloud-based and integrated into your everyday applications (calendars, HRIS, customer support tools).
Take the first step towards better planning: contact us to schedule a demo today!
