IT S THE YEAR OF THE AGENT!

Transcription

1 WHITEPAPER IT S THE YEAR OF THE AGENT! Use WFO to Revolutionize Your Agent Engagement

2 Use WFO to Revolutionize Agent Engagement Workforce optimization, or WFO, is one of those buzz terms that gets tossed around industry conversations quite frequently these days. But what does WFO actually mean? And more importantly, why do contact center professionals need to care? The answer is simple: WFO can be an absolute game changer for your company! It incorporates many core foundations of customer service and influences everything from the overall management of the contact center, to the agent s performance and experience, and on into the customer s journey with your brand. WFO at its simplest will improve productivity, increase overall customer satisfaction, and raise revenue. Defining WFO If you ask a group of contact center professionals to define WFO you ll likely get a wide range of responses. Although most will include workforce management (WFM) as part of WFO, there are differing opinions with the other components. When the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) and incontact asked this question as part of their workforce optimization survey in early 2014, we found that 73% of contact center leaders consider workforce optimization to include WFM, while 61% say performance management and 53% quality. What does your contact center consider as Workforce Optimization (WFO)?

3 WFO encompasses a lot of different pieces and isn t a single response option kind of question. And while it s true that technology is often the optimization power behind workforce; technology doesn t define WFO. It is really a strategy that must be accepted by all groups involved in order to succeed. According to incontact, workforce optimization is defined as: many processes and tools that are used for assessment and improvement of the agent and organization. These include workforce management, quality management, performance management, coaching management, training, analytics, voice of the customer, and interaction audio/ screen recording. WFO can provide unprecedented visibility into performance, operations, and customer intelligence across your organization. In a 2013 research report on multichannel agents, ICMI and incontact found that 85% of contact centers believe that happy agents make happy customers. This discovery set the stage for the predication that 2014 would truly be the year of the agent. Company-wide initiatives are being put in place to capitalize on the fact that happy agents make happy customers, and happy customers make happy (profitable) companies. And workforce optimization is the glue that holds those agent-customer-company pieces together. The Current State of WFO The responses to our recent survey reveal a lot of interesting data points and one very clear theme, WFO has moved from a nice to have to a must have strategy for most contact centers. Why? The number of channels that contact centers now support is staggering. What customer service channels are you currently supporting?

4 And to deal with all these channels agents are forced to use multiple systems. On average, agents use five applications to help a single customer. Consider all of the time agents waste looking for information through all the disparate systems. What customer experience data is being lost among these systems? And it isn t just the agents that are overburdened; 54% of managers are using 3-5 systems (CRM, chat, , etc) to manage their centers, while over 20% use 7-15 disparate tools or applications! How many disparate/unique systems do you use to manage your contact center?

5 For many contact centers the efficiencies lost across all these channels and applications can negatively impact their overall customer experience. Fortunately, our survey respondents recognize this, and value the importance of fixing it. Almost half reported that improving customer satisfaction was their primary goal for But how can a contact center create an outstanding customer experience when agents are forced to jump through so many hoops? The answer is simple; workforce optimization. Again, it s that glue that helps hold all of the pieces together. Let s step back for a second and again consider how the agent impacts the customer experience. If we make the agent s job easier, and give them better and faster access to customer data, they will naturally be able to help customers better. Additionally, if agents are provided with real-time input on their quality, productivity and performance, they are better able to make behavior adjustments and improve their subject matter comprehension again improving both the agent and the customer experience. WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT QUALITY MANAGEMENT PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WFO can be easier to understand, evaluate and improve on if we break out the pieces before putting them back together. For the purpose of this whitepaper we will focus on the three core pieces of WFO: workforce management, quality management, and performance management - all with greatly influence the agent. WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT has become complicated! The new complexities, customers and channels in our contact centers are making the foundations of WFM that much more important. These factors are the baseline of WFO, and often the most costly, as hitting service levels, managing to the peaks, and having a flexible and happy contact center staff costs money! WFM becomes even more challenging thanks to the preponderance of manual processes. Over 40% of respondents struggle with moving agents between skills, updating agent schedules, making real-time adjustments and building forecast models. In fact, 50% of our respondents thought that tying together performance and operational data is too time-consuming, as less than half have an automated WFM system in place to drive forecasting and scheduling. Without automation these imperative WFM decisions become arbitrary and based on human emotion or gut reaction rather than calculated business data. This translates to a very inconsistent experience for agents which can eventually lead to lower job satisfaction rates. Unhappy agents typically result in unhappy customers. QUALITY MANAGEMENT is another critical component of the contact center that is in need of some optimization. Quality assurance must stretch across all channels, which proves challenging as more and more channels are added. A QA plan needs to: Address the unique attributes of each channel Aggregate reporting across all channels for a consistent experience Correlate scores and results to CSAT responses Ensure measurement of the items that are most important to the customer

6 This is obviously much easier said than done. According to our survey, just over ¾ of respondents are currently monitoring customer-agent interactions. While that number is high, it s not 100%. There is also variation in the core components of the monitoring process. Over 80% use voice capture/recording but less than half use screen capture. Given the nature of customer interactions, failing to capture the agent s screen is a huge miss for coaching and improvement opportunities. What are the core components of your monitoring process? Almost half of our respondents would like the laborious process of identifying coaching and training opportunities to be quicker and more efficient. Forty-five percent wish listening to customer-agent interactions was automated with an almost equal amount wishing that the scoring of those interactions was automated as well. When left to manual processing, feedback interactions like scheduling and forecasting interactions, become subjective and can create a hostile environment among agents. The process of monitoring agents and providing feedback must be data driven. Agents need to clearly understand that the feedback they re receiving is not because they re being singled out by management but because there is actual business data to support the call for improvement. This begins with clear rules on the frequency of monitoring and feedback sessions, something that is very difficult to do when relying on a manual process. The frequency that our respondents indicated monitoring their agents each month proves this.

7 How often do you monitor each agent per month? Per channel? Phone - Inbound Phone - Outbound Chat Offline (fax and/or mail) Community Forum moderation SMS Social Media Mobile App/Smartphone App Video

8 PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT is important because it focuses on both customer service and contact center efficiency. High performing agents lead to high customer satisfaction. Agents will inevitably give you what you measure so it s important to make sure that your primary metrics, at all levels, contain both service (quality) and cost-focused (efficiency) metrics. The scorecard is often the best way of tracking and illustrating agent performance; however, the sheer amount of data provided can often bury the true insights that can help an agent perform better. Not only is there a challenge in the amount of data being collected, but once again, the manual data processing can be problematic. In order for the scorecard to be useful to the agent, it must be simplified and provided in near real-time. The balanced scorecard has been around for a long time and it can be really cumbersome, admits incontact s VP of WFO Solutions Group, Kristyn Emenecker. Fortunately technology has made great advancements in pulling all our data sources together and making them more accessible. By automating the process, you can get to the key metrics that matter more efficiently. Our respondents had a wish-list of performance management automation improvements. They acknowledge that agent performance management would be more effective with faster trend recognition, root-cause behavior discovery, and communication. All of which can be accomplished through automation. What components of your performance management are manual, that you wish were automated? At the end of the day, performance management remains a critical component of WFO because it s all about helping your frontline agents. Over 75% of our respondents agreed that agent performance would be better if their engagement levels were higher. It s a no brainer: happy agents lead to happier customers. However, current systems and processes often preclude contact centers from getting agents the information and coaching they need in an expedient fashion.

9 The Advancements in WFO It may initially seem like workforce optimization is too much of a challenge to tackle. But consider this: can your contact center continue to grow and gain efficiencies with the status quo? Will your agents be able to push through the myriad of metrics and tools on their own? Are the manual processes, the delays in agent feedback, and the missed service recovery opportunities holding back your optimal customer experience? If so, then you are already experiencing workforce misalignment. In the year of the agent, (and the years following), contact centers need to focus on improving agent conditions and fueling customer experience opportunities! Use the technological advances of WFO to get you there. Let s again address the core of any WFO solution - workforce management. One of the biggest challenges in workforce management is the task of scheduling and forecasting. New WFO technology allows what was once a very painful, time consuming process to become automated and efficient. With today s solutions and cloud based technology, scheduling can be done automatically and can even account for such aspects as work preferences, skill levels and forecasted call volumes. Scheduling and forecasting tools not only ensure that the contact center is properly staffed; the technology also removes management preferences or agent bias. This will reduce agent frustration, while still maintaining customer response times. WFO offers big improvements for quality management as well. From our survey results we know that 89% of contact centers utilize call recordings as part of their quality management program. Coupled with the recordings, the latest QA tools can perform content analysis of the call and make predications based on tone and language. These predictions include: likelihood of issue resolution, customer satisfaction, agent or customer distress, and probability of a sale or recovery effort. Unfortunately, less than half of the contact centers that use call recordings are also utilizing the associated recording of screen captures. Screen captures not only provide a visual of the call journey,(every component of the agent desktop is recorded), they also give insight into other non-voice channel interactions. New WFO tools allow you to monitor agent interactions across all channels from phone to chat to and social. WFO solutions even allow you to trigger training opportunities based on agent performance. Weaknesses across agents can be more easily identified, creating broader training opportunities for the organization. The tool s ability to capture interactions from all channels also allows you to replicate best-in-class examples for future trainings. WFO is about understanding how to manage your center in such a way that you have the right people at the right time that are SKILLED correctly, says Kristyn Emenecker. If you don t train them correctly you are not providing the foundations and you will never be able to close-the-loop completely. Performance management also sees huge benefits from the new WFO solutions. Those manual, cluttered scorecards our respondents identified as taking up too much time and not facilitating productive coaching? GONE! The new systems provide easy scorecard tools that allow employees across the organization to identify and understand the most critical KPIs. The easy interfaces help employees, especially agents, understand exactly how they are performing against those KPIs and where they need to improve to drive the success of the organization. These systems don t just stop at creating automated scorecards; they can also integrate data from the QA tools to drive training and coaching, as mentioned before. Instead of manually assessing agent performance at specific intervals for coaching or feedback, the system can automatically trigger suggested training and coaching modules based on issues identified in the QA data. Agents receive more timely feedback, allowing them to correct errant behaviors and practices before they have a critical impact on customer satisfaction levels. The systems can also identify root causes of behaviors, to ensure that suggested trainings really get to the nature of the problem.

10 The Future Is Now This is such an exciting time to be in the contact center space, declares incontact s Emenecker. We re revolutionary. Automation and workforce optimization is changing the way that the contact center is operating. And that can only mean a better experience for all involved agents, companies and customers alike. Today s often clunky WFO processes are a disservice to both frontline agents and end-user customers. Contact centers need to closely examine how current manual approaches to workforce, quality, and performance management are adversely affecting agent productivity and engagement. Our survey respondents indicated that the number one influencer that would make their agents more engaged was more recognition and appreciation. The way to make that happen is through more efficient tools that can flag best-in-class service moments or track agent growth. What are the TOP 3 influencers that would make your agents MORE ENGAGED?

11 And contact centers see the value of better tools, citing it as the number one influencer that would help their agents perform better. In fact, most of the items on their wish list for driving better performance can be realized through WFO. Understanding customers to provide the best experience is the focal point of progressive companies, noted Paul Jarman, CEO at incontact. incontact s comprehensive WFO solution provides key insights on the state of the customer relationship and delivers integrated and automated tools to act on that information. What are the TOP 3 influencers that would help your agents PERFORM better? Better agent performance shouldn t have to be part of a wish-list ; it should be a natural derivative of workforce optimization. The necessary WFO tools and processes needed to take the contact center to the next level exist today, and they don t require an all-or-nothing approach. Contact centers can and should create implementation strategies to rollout WFO technologies in stages. Choose the ones that make the most impact to workforce, quality, and performance management programs. While 2014 may be deemed the Year of the Agent, it is just the beginning of the revolution to increase agent engagement through WFO.

12 ABOUT THIS WHITEPAPER This whitepaper was made possible by the underwriting support of incontact ( ICMI research sponsors do not have access to research participant information, including individual survey responses. ABOUT ICMI The International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) is the leading global provider of comprehensive resources for customer management professionals - from frontline agents to executives - who wish to improve contact center operations, empower contact center employees and enhance customer loyalty. ICMI s experienced and dedicated team of industry insiders, analysts and consultants are committed to providing uncompromised objectivity and results-oriented vision through the organization s respected lineup of professional services including training and certification, consulting, events and informational resources. Founded in 1985, ICMI continues to serve as one of the most established and respected organizations in the call center industry. ABOUT incontact incontact (NASDAQ: SAAS) is the cloud contact center software leader, helping organizations around the globe create high quality customer experiences. incontact is 100% focused on the cloud and is the only provider to combine cloud software with an enterprise-class telecommunications network for a complete customer interaction solution. Winner of Frost & Sullivan 2012 North American Cloud Company of the Year in Cloud Contact Center Solutions, incontact has deployed over 1,300 cloud contact center instances. To learn more, visit