A Sponsored Article by OpenText
In June 2017, at Call Center Week in Vegas, OpenText Qfiniti received the Workforce Optimization Provider of the Year Award. During the evening gala, my colleague Matthew Storm went on stage to accept the award and gave the following statement: “The era of clunky call recording, bad coaching and crappy scheduling is over.”
The audience overwhelmingly cheered, clapped, and raised their arms in the air as if Matthew was running for political office. At that point, the groundswell began. Now is the time to re-evaluate your current workforce engagement management strategy and take a hard look at the cloud. Let me expand on what Matthew said in Vegas:
Rather than clunky, go cloud.
It doesn’t matter where agents are located anymore—brick and mortar, multi-site, work-at-home, outsourced agents—record your agents once. By integrating solutions such as Amazon Connect, recordings are stored cheaply in the cloud and used for playback, analytics and more. And when PCI compliance is a concern, look for creative ways to protect that data in the voice, and in the agent screens you capture. PCI is not going away and based on a number of recent data breaches, having the appropriate security and protocols in place will be critical.
Rather than traditional coaching, engage employees.
No more bad coaching conundrum, it’s time to implement targeted coaching that focuses on evaluating the right call types. No more cherry-picking calls, determine the appropriate interactions by leveraging speech analytics and deliver the appropriate calls to your teams to evaluate. Presenting calls in a work distribution list to your evaluators on a daily basis can eliminate the need to search for calls to evaluate. That is 8 hours a week in time savings! Another way to engage employees is to provide contextual guidance in the moment. Desktop analytics is a “must-have” and not a “nice to have”; providing/guiding agents with accurate and complete information is necessary as you are working to improve first-contact resolution (FCR), improving both customer and employee effort.
Say goodbye to poor scheduling and planning.
Throw out your spreadsheets and legacy WFM tools, put in place a robust scheduling and forecasting application that allows for agent enablement through their mobile devices. Mobile apps tied to your WFM application provide the flexibility of your ever-changing workforce the ability to use their smartphones to perform schedule swaps, schedule preferences and even volunteer to work overtime. And have you traditionally only used employee tenure as your shift-bidding metric? Consider smart shift-bidding, not just based on tenure, but incorporate other data points such as quality monitoring results and/or customer satisfaction survey scores.
2018 will be the year to replace your existing coaching solution and plan your move to the cloud. If you would like to learn more about Amazon Connect, learn how to cut your total cost of ownership by moving to pay as you go, and learn how to avoid traditional vendor headaches with costly upgrades, visit our website and request a quick demonstration.
http://www.opentext.com/QfinitiAmazonConnect
Until next time…
About the Author
Roger Lee, aka Dr. WFO, is the Solutions Marketing Director of Customer Experience Management (CEM) Growth Initiatives at OpenText. He has over 20 years of experience in contact center operations, information management systems and quality. Roger believes that finding ways to improve the customer experience is essential—and that the responsibility for improvement spans the entire enterprise.