Workforce engagement management (WEM) is key when it comes to ensuring your employees and customers are happy.
But keeping up with what’s available for contact centres when it comes to WEM and the benefits can seem like an impossible task.
It’s important for organisations to understand how WEM can create better outcomes for everyone though. Which is why we explored the latest WEM trends and solutions in a webinar with the South West Contact Centre Forum, Calabrio, Trainline and Hoover Candy.
Here, we’ve summarised the key things we discussed about how WEM can help to retain your team, improve operations and deliver excellent customer experiences.
What is Workforce Engagement Management?
Workforce Engagement Management usually refers to solutions used in contact centres to optimise employee engagement, productivity and performance.
WEM technology offers analysis and automation to improve quality and give valuable insight that’ll allow you to enrich customer experiences.
Contact centres also use WEM solutions to empower employees with more autonomy around things like scheduling and holiday requests.
How can WEM benefit my contact centre?
1. Increased Agent Autonomy
Contact centre agents want autonomy over their workdays, and organisations that understand this keep their best people for longer.
Workforce Management Solutions give agents the ability to create a better work life balance for themselves.
They can move and schedule breaks, get instant access to view shifts and overtime, and get automatic holiday approvals.
More control means better employee engagement and therefore business benefits like reduced attrition, improved customer service and higher productivity.
2. Gamification for Elevated Agent Experience
Contact centres have started using gamification to motivate agents in their as day to day work and training experiences.
Gamification introduces game-like elements such as points, badges, levels, and rewards into the workplace. The sense of competition and achievement acts as an incentivise to progress towards goals or KPIs by rewarding progress.
Contact centre agents can work together or individually to hit targets and win prizes, achieve records or log high scores.
Recognition is a huge driver of a huge driver of motivation in any workplace so giving regular rewards helps boost job satisfaction and employee staying power.
3. Streamline Operational Efficiency
Workforce engagement management tools play a critical role in optimising operational efficiency in the contact centre to reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience.
By leveraging WFM advanced forecasting and scheduling capabilities, allowing contact centres to accurately predict customer demand and schedule staff accordingly. By aligning staffing levels with expected call volumes, contact centres can minimise overstaffing or understaffing situations.
WEM solutions can also include quality management modules, such as call recording, evaluation, scoring and coaching. By monitoring the quality of customer interactions and providing feedback to your agents, contact centres can improve service quality, customer experience, identify training and coaching gaps and enhance efficiency.
4. Use of Predictive Analysis and AI Scheduling
Predictive analytics tools use historical data on things like customer feedback, seasonal changes, and agent activity to forecast future demand and staffing needs.
By closely analysing patterns and trends, these tools adjust your workforce capacity based on demand to reduce over or understaffing.
And gone are the days of manually allocating schedules. AI can automatically generate forecasts and allocate schedules based on agent skillsets and availability.
This means resource planners spend far less time manually creating schedules, and more time engaging with their teams.
5. Real-time Monitoring and Adjustment
Predictive analytics tools also allow you to monitor customer and agent interactions in real-time and make proactive adjustments to optimise performance.
Supervisors and managers can monitor KPIs like call volume, average handle time, service level, agent occupancy, and customer satisfaction scores. This allows you to make informed decisions about reallocating resource, adjusting staffing levels, providing additional training or support to agents, or implementing temporary measures to address sudden fluctuations in demand.
By taking a proactive approach, you can uphold high service standards whilst reducing operational costs and effectively managing staffing levels.
6. Embrace Omnichannel Customer Experience
Today’s consumers expect seamless omnichannel experiences across all contact channels.
Many contact centres have adopted a multi-channel approach, to satisfy the customer desire of “choice not voice”. But it’s not enough to offer your customers multiple contact channels, they want you to communicate between channels too.
For example, when a customer emails you then switches to a live chat – they expect the conversation to continue where it left off on the other channel.
For contact centres, this involves integrating your comms channels to give customers this seamless, easy experience.
Contact centres are moving away from standalone, and, disparate communication platforms, in favour of an integrated Omnichannel solution that unifies interactions across voice, email, chat and social media channels.
Embracing Omnichannel customer experiences does come with its challenges, however WEM technology can help mitigate these challenges with multi-skilled agent optimisation, channel prioritisation, real-time monitoring / adjustments and quality management across all channels.
Want to learn more about workforce engagement management?
Our expert team are available to discuss solutions and the benefits to your team.
Check out the recording from our insightful session with South West Contact Centre Forum, Calabrio, Trainline and Hoover Candy in which we discuss contact centre insights.
