What is Workforce Optimization (WFO) for contact centers?
Enhance operational efficiency with workforce management, AI-driven quality management, and conversational intelligence.
What does Workforce Optimization (WFO) mean?
WFO is comprised of different tightly integrated solutions, business processes, and other contact center technologies that aim to optimize and maximize employee productivity and efficiency.
Workforce Optimization is a suite that encompasses different operational aspects that affect business growth. It includes various contact center technologies like:
- Workforce management
- Quality management
- Interaction analytics
- Performance dashboards
- Gamification (adding gaming elements to processes)
We’ll expand on these later.
WFO is not a simple standalone software. It's closer to a unified tech ecosystem that involves different aspects of your contact center working together. With it, you can maximize the performance and efficiency of your workforce, so they can also provide the best customer experience.
What is WFO's role in a contact center?
Benefits of WFO
Why is workforce optimization
important in contact centers?
WFO suites provide your contact center with different tools that can help you optimize and maximize not only your workforce but your entire operation.
Through an effective WFO solution, your contact center can:
Reduce operational costs
Use AI-driven scheduling to maximize coverage to reduce long hold times and call abandonment while minimizing agent idle time.
Improve customer experience
From your past customer interactions, you'll be able to communicate better. You can achieve this not only through finding opportunities to improve employee performance but also seeing how other aspects of your contact center, like proper employee scheduling, can increase customer satisfaction.
Boost agent engagement
Agent turnover is a challenge many contact center leaders face each day. WFO helps keep your agents engaged and motivated to perform better. Happy agents lead to happy customers.
Enhance contact center operations
WFO provides detailed insights for you to monitor, understand, and proactively address customer needs. From identifying customer sentiment to the top areas of frustration, WFO can help you make better decisions.
How does WFO work?
WFO is more of a platform for business strategy than actual software. So there may not be a singular answer to this question. Businesses can go about it in different ways, depending on how they operate, their customer behavior, the location of their operations, and many other factors.
However, there are certain essential components that most, if not all, contact center solutions use to build their WFO platform.
Workforce Management (WFM)
What is workforce management?
Workforce management (WFM) refers to an integrated set of tools and processes that contact centers use to build agent schedules, manage timelines, and empower agents by making life easier for them, while maximizing their skill sets to increase productivity.
It's also about providing customers a consistent experience whenever they contact you, regardless of channel, including:
- Answering inbound calls and messages within a consistent time frame
- Providing the same level of expertise on every call as much as possible
On the flip side, it’s about increasing agent occupancy to keep your labor costs efficient. Any amount of time agents are not serving customers is a cost. WFM helps provide accurate forecasting and proper scheduling of agents.
What to look for in workforce management
In the past, attendance software was more straightforward because agents only handled one type of call. Agents could be assigned to billing, customer service, directory assistance, or technical support, but not many could handle more than one or two types of calls. As a result, human resources had an easier time. They just needed to consider when different types of calls came in and schedule most of their qualified agents on those shifts.
Contact centers have evolved since then. Today's agents may handle multiple types of issues from simple account queries to complex billing issues. They are expected to address these issues on different channels including calls, email, and chat. On top of that, they are expected to build a relationship with customers. Contact center managers and workforce analysts need to have a deeper understanding of their workforce's numerous skills and their customers’ behavior to know how to schedule agent shifts properly.
Fortunately, WFM tools help your contact center figure it out. These include:
Instead of complicated spreadsheets that you build manually, your workforce management software should include the ability to accurately forecast based on historical data.
With agents having multiple skills, you must be able to assign them to a schedule that will maximize these skills, while decreasing the chances they’ll receive calls they're not equipped to handle. Having a tool that defines your agents' skills, like who are the agents who can handle both chat and calls, is critical to proper scheduling.
What is the use of proper scheduling when your agents are not following it? Get a workforce management solution that has a robust, real-time adherence tracking feature for time and attendance to hold your agents accountable.
There will be times when your planned schedule will conflict with the plans of your agents. Empower your workforce with the flexibility of being able to trade shifts with people who share the same skill set and have a say in their preferred schedule.
Quality management (QM)
What is quality management (QM)?
In any business, you want to provide consistent quality in your products and services. It’s no different in contact centers. You want to provide your customers with great agent interaction every time they call.
Quality management software refers to the set of tools used in contact centers that help the quality assurance (QA) team review and monitor customer interactions by agents to ensure that each call is up to the standards expected from the company.
What to look for in a quality management platform
A good quality monitoring and management platform equips your QA team with tools that will help them review the quality of actual calls to provide the right feedback and coaching. It not only corrects agent mistakes but also dramatically improves agent performance.
Some of the features that you need in a good QM platform includes:
Traditional quality management tools were built with large enterprises in mind, who have thousands of agents and dedicated staff to set up and manage them. However, a large segment of businesses need a quality management tool that is available out of the box.
If you already have an existing QA process, you need the ability to customize evaluation forms to review the work of your agents. You want these forms to be customizable because the way you evaluate agents will inevitably evolve as better tools, technology, and strategies come up. You also want the ability to have these scorecards automatically reviewed by AI to reduce the workload for supervisors or QA teams.
The QA team should be able to easily identify the agents they want to monitor or review, the call they want to listen to, and summaries and key insights.
Interaction analytics
What is interaction analytics?
This feature, also referred to as conversation intelligence or conversation analytics, lets you identify keywords during voice and non-voice interactions (SMS, live chat, email, and social media) with customers. It includes common complaints or even compliments from callers.
It helps you discern disposition, identify opportunities, mitigate risk, and decide on the right action based on that data.
What to look for in interaction analytics
Top organizations are continuously looking for the latest interaction analytics and reporting technology to help them stay ahead of the curve.
With day-to-day operations growing more complex than ever, your interaction analytics platform should be flexible enough to keep pace. Some of the essential functions you need to future-proof your organization are:
Traditional measurements of customer satisfaction depended on manual post-interaction surveys, which can be hit or miss. An interaction analytics solution should be able to identify customer sentiment on every call to give you a complete, unbiased view of CSAT.
Each company has key words and phrases they want to track. Whether it is a phrase for a requested action (“Refund” for example), a competitor mention, or a product name, understanding how often these topics occur is a critical feature.
Understanding how your agents respond to objections by your customer can help identify best (or worst) practices to use in training. The key causes of customer frustration should also be easily understood, so your business can improve the products, services, and processes that lead to customer issues.
Performance management
What is performance management?
Performance management is a set of tools to help boost agent motivation and morale. Through gamification tools, performance management helps promote a sense of friendly competition between agents to incentivize better performance.
What to look for in a performance management solution
What you want in a performance management solution is the ability to combine call data and other contact statistics with other aspects of the contact center. It includes customer accounts, customer relationship management (CRM) software, or other back-end data that will give insight into how your operations is impacting your revenue.
Some of the functionality you want includes:
Data collection should be automated, so the latest information is always available without manual extraction. It not only allows for faster reporting and analysis, but it also reduces mistakes and errors commonly associated with manual data extraction.
You can create a tier of achievements where agents can earn badges by reaching each tier. These badges or ribbons are virtual representations of their accomplishments and the organization's recognition of those same accomplishments.
Agents can compete for top rank on specific performance metrics, like who has the best call handle time, who can get the most feedback from customer surveys, or who has the best QA metrics overall.
How is WFO deployed?
Like most contact center-related technologies, on-premise setups used to be the only option for deployment of WFO solutions.
In this scenario, organizations had to come up with their hardware to support the IT infrastructure hosting the service. This setup led to some problems for businesses.
For example:
For example:
- While providers were responsible for software support, your company still needed to manage and maintain the hardware and infrastructure
- If you had multiple contact centers, you also needed separate infrastructure for each location
- The costs of maintaining, managing, troubleshooting, and everything else fell in your organization's bucket
Cloud technology, however, has drastically improved how workforce optimization solutions are deployed. Providers like RingCentral now deploy the WFO suite within their cloud contact center solution.
It means that the provider now handles all maintenance and hardware costs (including actual infrastructure). That's on top of handling software upgrades and updates as well.
As a result, companies can focus on using the WFO suite instead of spending their time and money maintaining the infrastructure that supports it.
How to choose the right workforce optimization software
When you power your contact center with RingCentral’s RingCX, you'll get the full breadth of capabilities from telephony and call routing functions to collaboration and analytics from one single provider. You get all of the WFO capabilities you need to deliver business goals, without the complexity of managing multiple providers. Instead, RingCentral helps simplify the process by providing a single provider relationship, single bill, and single support organization.
Learn more about RingCX today
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