Top 5 Reasons Your Contact Centre Needs a WFM Solution

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, contact centres play a pivotal role in delivering exceptional customer service.

To optimize operations while ensuring the optimal customer experience, a workforce management (WFM) solution is viewed as essential for large contact centres and strongly recommended for small ones.

In this article, Mark Ligi explores the top reasons why you should consider adopting WFM for your contact centre.

1. Effective Resource Planning

In the highly dynamic environment of contact centre operation, a WFM solution supplies order and predictability.

It creates optimized agent workforce schedules based on historic interaction data for calls, emails, chats and other channels, plus the skills required – whether your agents are working in an office, at home, or in a hybrid mode. To enable useful planning, WFM can:

• Forecast traffic in and out of your contact centre over a given period
• Use this forecast data to build optimized schedules for your agents
• Populate schedules based on individual agent availability and skills
• Test different schedules and analyze the effect and cost before publishing
• Manage real-time activity both proactively and reactively
• Deliver comprehensive reporting and analytics

2. Streamlined Operations

WFM aligns staffing levels with demand, channel, inquiry type, and agent skills and knowledge. This results in:

• Consistent Workflow: Agents are available when needed, and with the skills required, preventing service disruptions.
• Adherence to SLAs: Comprehensive reporting and adherence tracking in WFM will help you stay in compliance with labor laws and ensure that you meet your service level agreements.
• Optimized Application of Resources

3. Improved Employee Experience and Performance

Without WFM, contact centres often struggle with staffing levels, over-expectation, and inefficient task allocation, leading to frustration and suboptimal performance. Here’s how WFM addresses this:

• Optimized Scheduling: By ensuring that agents are scheduled effectively, WFM solutions help reduce instances of overstaffing or understaffing and create a more balanced workload for agents including ensuring that they receive adequate breaks.
• Skills-Based Scheduling: WFM identifies agents’ skills and assigns them ies. Agents then feel more confident and can also respond more quickly and effectively, improving first-call resolution (FCR) scores.
• Identifying Training Needs: WFM insights will highlight training gaps in your current resources, and allow you to schedule training for agents, improving both performance and job satisfaction.
• Schedule Flexibility: By allowing agents to view schedules, request time off, and swap shifts with colleagues autonomously, WFM can lead to higher morale and better work-life balance.

4. Enhanced Customer Experience

Customer satisfaction relies on timely and effective engagement. WFM improves first-call resolution (FCR) rates and reduces wait times, making you more competitive with the following methods and outcomes:

• Optimized Scheduling Properly staffed contact centres shorten or eliminate time on hold, reducing caller frustration and improving CX.
• Skills-Based Scheduling: Caller satisfaction greatly improves when connected to agents who have the appropriate skills and expertise to handle their inquiries.
• Effective Training and Development: Agents receiving identified training and development are better equipped to handle caller inquiries effectively and provide callers with a positive experience.
• Consistent Service Quality: With proper scheduling, you can maintain a consistent level of service across all shifts, improving both brand image and CX.

5. Cost Savings

WFM directly impacts your bottom line by:

• Decreased Operational Costs: Precise scheduling by a WFM solution minimizes overstaffing or understaffing. By optimizing staffing with the right number of agents at the right times, you will avoid unnecessary expenses.
• Reduced Administration Overhead: WFM automates resource scheduling, freeing up your highly valuable managers and team leaders to better support your agents in delivering an optimum customer experience.
• Lower Attrition Rates: Giving your agents a better work-life balance, enhanced skills, and more autonomy will lead to lower attrition, reducing recruiting and onboarding costs.
• Reduced Abandonment Rates: Prolonged wait times, leading to higher call abandonment rates, produce unhappy customers who may switch to a competitor or share a negative review on social media, negatively impacting your company’s revenue and reputation.

In summary, WFM transforms your contact centre by balancing workforce allocation, improving agent performance, and ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction.

Consider integrating a robust workforce management solution to stay ahead in the competitive customer service landscape!

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Enghouse Interactive – View the Original Article

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Enghouse Interactive