Workforce Optimization (WFO) is a business strategy that helps your team work more productively within the contact center. Often used as a blanket term, workforce optimization usually contains several different components from internal processes to productivity software to metrics and analytics. The goal of workforce management is to continually refine and improve how your business operates, engages with customers, collaborates internally, and more.
It may help to think of WFO as a holistic approach that aligns your contact center business practices and technological solutions to work together more effectively. Below, we will explain the major concepts and technologies within workforce optimization so you’ll have a clearer picture of how it can benefit your organization.
How Does Workforce Optimization Work?
Because WFO is a business strategy that includes technology as a fundamental component, how it works can differ for various businesses depending on their operating needs and goals. However, there are several fundamental processes and tools that underpin the ability to execute WFO. These include:
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Workforce Management: WFM is a set of internal processes that enable you to see, both historically and in real-time, the number of contact center agents required to provide great customer service at any given point. It will help you forecast call volumes, staff your contact center appropriately and adjust the moment demands change unexpectedly.
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Quality Management: QM helps you measure and scores the performance of your service agents on calls so you can quickly identify areas of strength or weaknesses. This ensures your workers are continually improving upon the skills they need to give the highest levels of customer care.
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Interaction Analytics: IA studies conversations across the omnichannel to detect patterns within your calls, texts, chats, video, and other communications. This technology will give you insights into the root cause of customers reaching out and many other trends within those interactions.
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Performance Management: PM is an extension of quality management, allowing deeper understanding into call center performance and finding specific areas that can be improved over time both on an individual level and for the contact center as a whole.
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Forecasting: As mentioned earlier, forecasting is a tool that helps you predict call volumes and adapt your contact center to meet customer demand. Long term, this data becomes invaluable at predicting trends and ensuring that proper staffing levels are available.
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Skills-Based Routing: Skills-based routing takes advantage of performance and quality management to ensure that the best possible agent for each interaction is assigned. This technology uses a scoring system to route calls appropriately as they come in.
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Real-Time Reporting: Instantaneous reporting via dashboards provides customizable views of all the technologies discussed here. Managers can track and optimize the performance of their team at a glance throughout the day.
How Does WFO Benefit RingCentral Users?
As mentioned above, WFO makes it much easier for RingCentral teams to identify and visualize where improvements can be made as time goes on. Each interaction with a customer provides a tiny piece of a very large puzzle, with countless data points that can guide and refine the processes within your organization. Workforce management not only provides the tools to make sense out of that data, but it also gives a deeper insight into your employees, customers and actual processes as well.
How is Workforce Optimization Implemented?
Traditionally, WFO was implemented via separate software solutions that had to be installed at each contact center location and then optimized through the efforts of the IT team. The average contact center manages 20 different vendors for their analytics, intelligence, and workforce scheduling.
Workforce Optimization is a simple add-on feature to the RingCentral Contact Center solution. It is ideal for larger organizations with many locations or a hybrid workforce, and it incorporates across all your existing channels to begin gathering data and providing both present and historical insights.
If your team would like to learn more about workforce optimization technologies on the RingCentral platform, contact Converged Technology Professionals today.
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Suellen Meyers: December 21, 2023
