Description

Frost & Sullivan defines workforce optimization (WFO) as a strategy to integrate disparate contact center workforce applications, monitor and analyze customer and agent interactions, and automate processes to optimize resources. WFO is an important segment of the contact center industry because it drives performance, agent engagement, and an improved customer experience (CX).

Improving employee experience (EX) is a critical part of a WFO strategy. This has been a longstanding effort within customer care because the contact center industry has traditionally had high employee turnover (agent churn). Efforts are well underway to address churn for multiple reasons, including the cost of replacing and training agents, the loss of more seasoned, knowledgeable agents (and that knowledge with them), and the direct impact that unhappy agents can have on customer interactions.

Inclusive to WFO are complementary functions under a smaller umbrella of workforce engagement management (WEM) that focus on recruitment, onboarding, evaluating, training, coaching, and motivating the workforce, which is critical in WFO strategies.

WEM is a broad category that embraces both mindsets and solution sets. The mindset springs from the realization that EX and CX are equally important and interdependent—all areas of the contact center impact WEM. This includes enhancements to self-service channels that deflect live agent interactions or reduce agent effort during more complex calls to improve agent engagement.

WFO improvements are rapidly accelerating, particularly through the infusion of AI technologies. For instance, myriad solution providers are marketing virtual agent assist bots that construct real-time transcriptions and perform analytics to guide agents during interactions and create post-call summaries. These same tools can also automatically pinpoint training and coaching opportunities in real time. Gamification, which was previously generally thought of as a nice-to-have feature, has grown in capabilities and popularity due to its demonstrable benefits inside and outside the contact center with a solid return on investment (ROI).

This insight details the trends and innovations that are impacting contact center WFO today, particularly through the use of AI technologies. It outlines growth opportunities that solution providers can attain by taking advantage of maturing technologies and enterprise market needs. It also lays out a sampling of solution provider use cases that are having an impact on WFO.

Author: Nancy Jamison