Workforce Management to Embrace the Mobile Trend

The technology we have available at our fingertips provides instant access to information to improve our knowledge, increase our likelihood of making the right purchase and even spread the good news when a company meets our expectations. This technology also makes it easy to interact with the contact center via live conversations or self-service options. How the company responds to those interactions can make or break the value of the brand in the mind of the consumer.

This is where workforce management solutions lend the most value. The contact center needs the ability to accurately anticipate the volume of interactions in a given period of time, schedule according to the anticipated calls and available agent skill sets and make changes when actual activity doesn’t match predicted levels. There’s simply too much to balance to try and do it manually and contact center managers need to be able to make the customer experience the key focus.

The challenge, of course, is ensuring the optimal customer experience when customers are on the move 24x7. They expect to receive a higher level of quality care regardless of the selected time or interaction channel. It doesn’t matter if they call in the middle of the day, text in the afternoon or access the IVR in the middle of the night – the experience must be consistent across each of these channels. Without workforce management solutions in place to anticipate these interactions, customer service efforts may fall short.

It is in the anticipation of these unexpected contacts that prove to be the most challenging. Consumers are mobile and they take the same devices they use to interact with the contact center with them at all times. To increase the challenge, they also use these devices to share information via social media channels. If the service they receive from the contact center is less than stellar and the interaction ends without satisfaction, the customer can let tens of thousands of friends and followers know right away with a simple Facebook post or tweet on Twitter (News - Alert).

This fear of instant bad publicity is enough to have the contact center manager on edge, watching every move made within the center at any given time, constantly making adjustments and handling interaction himself/herself when the workload gets to be too much. Such an approach may seem the right way to go to ensure all volume is handled, but it can actually cause more problems by introducing chaos into the mix.

To help stave off the chaos and instead manage a fully-functional contact center that operates with efficiency to meet customer expectations, Teleopti will discuss this topic in more depth during: Workforce Management for a World in Motion on Tues., Mar. 5 at 1PM EST.