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Increase productivity of your remote contact centre with workforce management


Johannesburg, 15 Sep 2020

Have you ever wondered how a workforce management tool increases the productivity of your remote contact centre? Well, this is fundamental for the good performance and performance of the contact centre, and even more so in remote work mode.

Staff management can be one of the biggest challenges in managing your operations, and this situation is exacerbated by teleworking. The lack of control of agents and even the absence of monitoring their performance become more evident in this environment. Hence, the importance of implementing a workforce management solution that allows you to control, and, in turn, increase the productivity of your remote contact centre.

Today, it is still commonly thought that there is a direct relationship between the productivity of a worker and the physical location of his or her supervisor. This is a matter of the past. The effects of remote work, in terms of workforce management, depend largely on the implementation of appropriate tools that ensure the control and availability of resources with the appropriate skills in real-time.

Perhaps you have found yourself in a dilemma of not knowing how to control the operation remotely. With agents located in different places, you find it difficult to efficiently size the resources of the contact centre. Does this situation sound familiar? Well, for remote work to be successful and increase the productivity of your contact centre, you must have a balance between available resources and service demand.

But how do you manage your workforce working remotely? The solution lies in the implementation of a workforce management (WFM) tool, which allows you to plan the right number of people, at the right time, and with the necessary knowledge.

What does a WFM tool do?

There are two situations that result from inappropriate workforce management, over- and undersized. In the first one, you have more staff than you really need and you are paying salaries unnecessarily, and in the second one, you do not manage to cover the requested service metrics, thus generating an unpleasant experience for your customers.

In either case, inadequate staffing can result in:

  • Increase in operating costs;
  • Decrease in productivity;
  • Lack of work for agents;
  • Reduction in income;
  • Work overload or saturation;
  • Absenteeism and staff turnover; and
  • Decreased service levels.

With a workforce management solution, it is possible to streamline and optimise processes by obtaining more accurate scenarios for the proper management of your workforce.

Enghouse Interactive’s WFM solution makes it easy to forecast and schedule the work of contact centre staff on an easy-to-use platform, designed to increase agent retention and productivity, as well as reduce administrative costs.

In this video, we show you in detail what are the key factors of this tool.

Video link https://youtu.be/6PyzB8RTrFY

Features of Enghouse Interactive’s WFM tool

This solution goes far beyond workforce planning, as it:

  • Forecasts the demand for the service;
  • Creates schedules automatically;
  • Develops accurate and insightful reports;
  • Improves overall customer service operation;
  • Sizes, forecasts and allocates resources in real-time; and
  • Knows who is available and what their skills are to achieve a balance between resources and demand and, in turn, reduce absenteeism.

What are its benefits?

By implementing this tool in your contact centre, you will achieve:

  • Control of your staff’s schedules (attendance, free time, vacations, leave, etc);
  • Improved service levels without increasing operating costs by reducing periods of lack or excess of personnel;
  • Increased revenue, thanks to the reduction of abandonment and the reduction of waiting times, while increasing up- and cross-selling;
  • Improved employee productivity by 30%, thanks to clear objectives and metrics, performance feedback and greater schedule flexibility;
  • Analysis of atypical scenarios and preparation for unforeseen situations; and
  • The monitoring of the performance of your agents, obtaining in detail the real KPIs of the employees.

In this context, the proper implementation of a WFM solution will allow you to increase the efficiency of your processes and thus the productivity of your staff. Having control of resources, besides increasing your income, reducing operating costs, and positively impacting the customer experience, it will also facilitate the scheduling, forecasting, and scheduling of the workload of agents, according to the demand for the service, in order to meet the objectives set. All this in an automated way and with a defined methodology.

Without any doubt, a good balance in the sizing of the staff will avoid overload or lack of work, thus allowing staff to maximise the value of each interaction with the customer and improve service levels.

If you want more information about how to implement workforce management in your contact centre, leave us your details and we will contact you to discuss your needs in a personalised way.

Contact us.

WFM is included in the Smart Staff Optimization (SSO) toolkit. With the implementation of SSO in your contact centre, it is possible to properly manage the operation by working remotely. It facilitates total control, allows constant and timely monitoring of KPIs, and ensures the quality of service delivery.

Read more about SSO here.

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