The Workforce Intelligent Contact Center: Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together

Contact Centers are complex. Most companies operate many of their functions and applications independently. For example, one team may be handling quality assurance, another handling training, and another team scheduling employees. All while, supervisors manage coaching with their staff, managers are running reports and IT teams managing telecom, contact routing, and IVR messaging. Although, this has been working in contact centers for some time, it isn’t feasible any longer. In fact, the multi-channel contact center can’t operate well with these silos and segmented operations.  It’s disconnected. Agents feel disconnected, customers feel it, and ultimately, your company will or is feeling it through employee attrition, customer churn, and reduced revenues and lost sales. Believe it or not, it is all very, very connected.

Contact Centers are handling more channels today than ever before: Phone calls, email, chat, SMS, social, mobile, and self-service. With these added channels, typically come added applications to work from. On an average, employees in contact centers need to access 5 different applications in order to assist a single customer! More than half of companies say it is a manual process to tie together performance behavior and their operational data at the same time saying that it is way too time consuming. Examples of manual processes include: changing employees skills, updating schedules, real-time exceptions, identifying coaching and training opportunities, listening and scoring agent-customer interactions, communicating quality scores, updating performance scores, identifying trends in agent and customer behaviors, consistent delivery of training materials across large audiences, objective training assessments, and effectively pinpoint customer satisfaction pain points.

Surely, if you are reading this, you can agree that your contact center may share some of the above complexities. You may also be shaking your head to some of the manual processes that affect your center. The decision maker in contact center has changed. It is shifting from people manual managing process to technology automation. The concept is Workforce Intelligence (WFI).  WFI is the power of your contact center platform plus workforce optimization tools coupled with automated actions together in the cloud. While others in the contact center industry market continue to embrace a single point of sale, inContact has taken a bold approach to decades-old equation. No longer should WFO be a “bolt-on”. It should serve as the core intelligence engine. We believe this fundamentally changes the notion that WFO innovation can be solely driven by outside, best of breed point solutions, and relegated to the minimal touch points they’ve historically shared.  We believe the market will begin to demand innovation that grows within the full context of the evolution of channel, responsive routing, task assignment, state and skill management.  It’s time to make your contact center an intelligent one with Workforce Intelligence.