Adapting Workforce Optimization to Meet the Rapidly Changing Priorities of Contact Center Operations

In normal times, workforce optimization is a business approach that utilizes advanced contact center technologies to improve customer experience while boosting overall operational efficiency. WFO includes…but is not limited to…automating processes, creating greater data visibility, ensuring compliance, performance management, recording, surveying, eLearning, speech analytics and solving staff-related business problems.

Now, businesses and government agencies are either requiring employees to work from home or redirecting call traffic to employees in less affected regions to handle spikes in interaction volume during the COVID-19 outbreak. Of course, this has led to additional considerations in terms of people and priorities, such as:

• Increasing the focus on risk assessment and controls
• Greater emphasis on employee communications, policies, and messaging to ensure that front-line personnel are kept abreast of all pertinent facts
• Updating QA monitoring and reporting procedures to incorporate the activities of an elevated number of remote workers
• Improving agility and flexibility while enhancing agent empathy

With the non-stop changes everyone is currently experiencing—constant uncertainty about what might happen in the immediate future, shifting schedules for work and school, caring for family members and overriding concerns about ongoing health risks—employees are often exhausted by the effort required to simply maintain a sense of consistency in their lives.

This rapidly evolving scenario is spurring a greater sense of urgency for businesses to promote employee engagement and prevent morale from cratering among both remote and premise-based agents. Companies are creating policies on the fly to make necessary adjustments during the transition. Among the strategies to be addressed are minimizing uncertainty by more meticulous tracking of outcomes to better predict results. Agents also need to be given higher degree of empowerment. This can be abetted by ensuring they are equipped with the tools and information necessary to do their jobs.

Taking the necessary steps to stabilize and improve workforce performance during the current crisis will be outlined on Tuesday, July 7th at 1:00 pm ET. CrmXchange offers a complimentary roundtable webcast on Best Practices for Workforce Optimization. It will highlight proven approaches and actionable insights to help optimize efficiency in contact center environments.  Among the topics to be discussed are:

• Using WFO tools to help agents safely make the return to the office
• Managing hybrid workforce of remote and onsite workers
• Incorporating regional COVID-19 related safety regulations into business practices
• Spending time wisely – Establishing more frequent touchpoints to ensure agents continue to feel connected
• Keeping agents motivated by sharing successes and reward achievements

The roundtable will feature presentations from two experts from leading WFO solution providers. Rich Correia, Director of Product Marketing, NICE will share his expertise in deploying the right products to meet changing need. Kelly Koelliker, Director, Content Marketing for Verint will provide insight on adapting the most effective contact center workforce engagement solutions.

Register now for this targeted and topical roundtable discussion. For those who can’t attend the live session, a link to the webcast will be posted 24 hours after it has been completed.

Is Gamification Right for Your Contact Center?

Gamification might be a contact center buzzword right now, but the fact that it’s trendy doesn’t make it right for your agents. In order for gamification to be successful, you have to have analytics, agents and management all on the same page, and your team members’ personalities have to be more cohesive than contrasting. Here are five factors to determine whether or not gamification is a good choice for you.

First Things First: What is Gamification?

Gamification refers to game mechanics in the contact center that are used to motivate employees. Agents compete to finish objectives before others. Competition can be based on practically anything, but should focus on the areas that need the most improvement. These could include hours worked, average speed to answer, first call resolution, total talk time, after-call work time, or percentage of calls segmented by type. Rewards are doled out, ranging from leaderboard ranking to badges, trophies and other physical prizes.

5 Gamification Considerations

1. Everyone will have to see each other’s scores in order to benchmark their own score and spur on the competition. Agents will then know that the winner was fairly chosen, which instills confidence and trust in management. To do this, though, you’ll need a robust, reliable reporting system that includes the metrics you want to track.
2. Several agents must participate, not just a select few, and they have to be agents who are able to engage in healthy rivalry. You may want to create a team building program before deciding if gamification is right for your contact center.
3. You’ll need a system setup to detect and report cheating. Some agents may try to make it look like they’re doing more just for the sake of winning.
4. New hires do well with gamification because it can help them learn faster and retain information better. However, they might be at the bottom of the scoreboard when learning because they’re competing against seasoned agents, and that could inhibit their confidence. Carefully choose the competitions that new hires are included in, and consider having them only compete against other new hires, which will level the playing field.
5. Gamification usually requires some amount of supervision. Consider how realistic it is for management to get involved based on their availability.

Have you setup gamification in your contact center? We want to hear about your experience!