Transport for NSW selects Alvaria Workforce Engagement Management Suite for Back-Office and Agent Improvement Tools and Mobile Schedule Management
The leaders in the development of safe, integrated and efficient transport systems for the people of New South Wales, Transport for NSW has selected Alvaria WEM Suite, provided by Alvaria channel partner Call Design.
Transport for NSW was looking for a platform that could seamlessly integrate across the entire workforce planning cycle integrated with their omnichannel contact centre that includes voice, live chat and back-office functionality. In order to take advantage of the superior forecasting, scheduling and monitoring capabilities available they chose the Alvaria WEM Suite.
Transport for NSW selected Alvaria Workforce as it offered the award-winning technology they required to keep their workforce productive and engaged. The ability to build and customize reports easily in Employee Datacenter as well as enabling the Transport for NSW workforce to request schedule trades, apply for overtime or annual leave directly from their mobile devices is a great way to keep staff engaged.
Mark Uremovic, Resource Planning Manager at Transport for NSW said, “When we were looking for a workforce engagement product, we conducted a lot of research. We went with Alvaria Workforce because the results of our research showed us that it was the strongest product in the market and had the functionality we required. The choice was easy.”
Steve Seger, Alvaria Chief Commercial Officer said, “It’s an honour to partner once again with Call Design. They’re delivering the robust functionality Transport for NSW needed to forecast, schedule and help agents perform at their absolute best.”
Learn more about the Alvaria Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) Suite.
About Alvaria
Alvaria is the world leader in enterprise-scale customer experience (CX) and workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions. Our name is derived from Latin for “hives” – nature’s perfect form for millions of years – bringing you solutions that are scalable, resilient and secure, with efficiency, speed and pinpoint accuracy. ALVARIA™. Reshaping Customer Experience™. For more information, please visit www.alvaria.com.
About Call Design
The staff at Call Design are well-recognised as experts in workforce optimisation solutions for contact centres in Australia, New Zealand, United States, Europe and Asia. Offering both on-site and in-the-cloud solutions, Call Design has a robust offering of innovative solutions that optimise the workforce. Combining best-in-class technologies with an experienced team of consultants to offer businesses personalised workforce optimisation solutions, Call Design empowers your employees, engages customers, and automates everyday work processes with seamless implementation aimed at enhancing efficiencies at every level of an organisation.
How an Intelligent Automation Solution can Overcome Common Contact Centre Challenges
Intelligent automation can alleviate common challenges and bring greater quantifiable operational and financial benefits to contact centres by elevating pressures on service delivery and improving the bottom line. Intelligent automation solutions are increasingly being applied throughout the contact centre industry to help you deliver a better customer experience and improve processes, as well as seamlessly support agents.
In the last few years, team leaders, trainers and WFM analysts have faced more and more challenges such as high attrition rates and needing to effectively monitor agent productivity, provide support, deliver training and find ways to improve contact centre operations.
As a result, many contact centres have implemented intelligent automation solutions such as Intradiem to help.
Find how intelligent automation is empowering contact centres and helping them overcome some of the challenges they face:
The Expense and Loss of Experience due to high Employee Attrition rates
Intelligent automation empowers not only agents but the whole workplace environment. Organisations that have implemented this reported that it helped reduce attrition as it reduces the time agents need to spend on more tedious tasks, provides informational pop-up notifications, facilitates coaching and helps employees feel more supported and connected with their teams.
Automating the manual tasks, allows team leaders and managers to spend more time coaching and developing their teams. Learning and Development teams can deliver content more efficiently and therefore much more regularly, regardless of where staff are working from thus helping staff to feel more supported.
Time-Consuming, Manual Processes for Exception Management
Team leaders and/or the WFM team spend a huge amount of time updating schedules with exceptions in the WFM system. This process is required to provide realistic insight into what is happening on the day, but the time taken to do this is unrewarding. Automating schedule updates is much more effective and efficient giving your staff more time back in their day to do analysis of the results. Real Time automation can monitor login and logout information and compare it to what an agent’s schedule says they should be doing and will update their schedule accordingly.
Improved Agent Productivity
Intelligent Automation can be used to improve the efficiency of off-phone tasks such as ACW or training. Schedule related distractions can be minimised using the tool and reminders can be sent to deliver timely support. Agents can also be coached and trained with small snippets of online training rather than needing scheduled classroom training. This keeps staff current, knowledgeable and motivated while also increasing their productivity.
Cost of Labour
As inflation continues to rise, so do employee expectations and the need for wage increases. According to CXCentral one customer service agent costs $53,066 (plus super) with an average bonus of $1,999. A customer service team leader salary is $74,500 with an average bonus of $4,500 plus super.
Intradiem’s intelligent automation can empower a contact centre to better utilise agent time and maximise labour resources. The software can provide clearer performance metrics and deeper management insights which team leaders can use to ensure agents are in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills.
Intelligent automation can overcome several contact centre challenges by streamlining processes and increasing operational efficiencies. As the demand for contact centre services increases and agents continue to work either from home or in a hybrid model, it’s imperative to adopt industry best practices and world-class intelligent automation software to optimise processes and better utilise resources.
If you’d like to learn more about intelligent automation and how to capture the full value of the software in your contact centre, contact our expert team today.
The Rise of Intelligent Automation Solutions to Improve Contact Centre Productivity
Unlocking productivity within a contact centre through the utilisation of intelligent automation is key to quantifying how automation and artificial intelligence has provided an unprecedented return on investment.
As contact centres strive to streamline operations, improve customer experience and create work environments conducive to success, the deployment of intelligent automation is reinforcing the optimal blend of human skills and technology.
The business case for intelligent automation is simple; it increases customer service agent productivity, reduces the time team leaders and workforce management (WFM) spend on low-value tasks and provides proficiency in streamlined training delivery.
Contact centres are renowned for being challenged by employees who are required to process and react to the right information in a timely manner to support frontline staff and manage inherently fluctuating conditions.
The ability for team leaders to gain real-time insights to maintain and elevate productivity and provide valuable assistance on difficult calls is traditionally a challenge. What intelligent automation does is improve the ability to increase the productivity of agents through real-time insights and a reduction of manual tasks. It gives team leaders the knowledge faster and more efficiently, while at the same time, reducing the demand agents have for their help.
Intelligent automation’s ability to quantify return on investment is appealing from a business case perspective. ROI alone prioritises intelligent automation over many other new innovations, with contact centres realising value fast.
4 key benefits of using intelligent automation solutions in contact centres include:
Efficiency of Employee Training
Finding time for agent training is essential to improving capabilities. Intradiem’s ability to automatically deliver training to individual agents during pockets of availability is key to reducing time wastage. As a result, training delivery is less disruptive as fewer agents need to be in training simultaneously and there is less need to get people to work overtime so that training can be completed. It also reduces the amount of time required by the WFM team and team leaders to schedule and reschedule training for those who missed it, as it is delivered in smaller, online, bite-sized chunks.
Reduced Employee Attrition
Manual, low-level tasks have a significant impact on contact centre agents, team leaders, WFM analysts and trainers and therefore job satisfaction. Reducing the time needed for more tedious tasks like exception entry by the WFM team and providing agents with coaching and support when they need it can help staff feel more connected to their teams and supported by their company. As a result employee attrition is lowered as staff have better job fulfilment.
Greater Customer Service Agent Productivity
Intradiem’s ability to find areas of efficiencies and to improve the productivity of agents’ on and off phone tasks such as providing support and training and after-call work (ACW) is game-changing. The simplicity of being able to adjust the rules engine to optimise use cases for the unique environments within contact centres is heightened by the ability to streamline large volumes of data and low-value tasks renewing focus on higher value-adding tasks.
Elevate Flexibility
If the pandemic has shown us anything, it is that all contact centres must be adaptable and dynamic. Intelligent automation provides the support staff need when working remotely. Intradiem’s SaaS-based solutions help facilitate working from home environments as it lets team leaders know when agents need help so they can monitor, coach and deliver help when it is needed. It also enables centres to offer more voluntary time off.
Additionally, intelligent automation reinforces flexibility to support all unique contact centre environments through its integration with your automatic call distribution systems, WFM platform and learning management systems. As a result, decision-makers can seamlessly respond to the ever-changing conditions in the contact centre.
By using intelligent automation, contact centres are empowered to free up valuable time, reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve the quality of contact centre work environments. If you would like to learn more about Intradiem’s intelligent automation, let’s chat.
TSA Group Chooses Alvaria Workforce Engagement Management For Volume Forecasting, Mobile Schedule Management and Optimal Seat Utilisation
Alvaria and Call Design announce a new Alvaria Workforce customer, TSA Group. Australia’s leading CX outsourcing solutions provider, TSA Group, has approximately 3,000 customer service and sales agents servicing industries including telco, health insurance, finance and retail. TSA Group considers themselves an extension of their partners’ businesses, helping them connect with their customers through the end-to-end provision of care, acquisition, sales, back office and collections services.
TSA Group opted to migrate to the Alvaria Workforce, provided by Alvaria channel partner Call Design, to take advantage of the added capability and benefits of a contact centre-as-a-solution (CCaaS). With Australian operations in Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Philippines operations in Manila, TSA Group was in the market for an enterprise-level, cloud workforce management solution with sophisticated forecasting and scheduling capability. Alvaria Workforce enables TSA to optimise resources across multiple teams and customer campaigns.
TSA Group needed a solution that would provide their agents with advanced self-service capabilities to ensure their staff have the ability to access shift information, request time off and swap shifts remotely. Alvaria Workforce was selected to help TSA accomplish their goal by maximising contact centre efficiency while minimising operating costs.
Philippe Lanoux, TSA Group Reporting and Analytics manager, said, “We needed a cloud solution that would integrate with our broader contact centre technology, and provide our staff with a tool that enables them to manage their schedules when out of the office. These were important factors in our decision to move to Alvaria Workforce with Call Design.”
Learn more about how the Alvaria Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) Suite can maximise contact centre productivity without increasing cost.
About Alvaria
Alvaria is the world leader in enterprise-scale customer experience (CX) and workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions. Our name is derived from Latin for “hives” – nature’s perfect form for millions of years – bringing you solutions that are scalable, resilient and secure, with efficiency, speed and pinpoint accuracy. ALVARIA™. Reshaping Customer Experience™. For more information, please visit www.alvaria.com.
About Call Design
The staff at Call Design are well-recognised as experts in workforce optimisation solutions for contact centres in Australia, New Zealand, United States, Europe and Asia. Offering both on-site and in-the-cloud solutions, Call Design has a robust offering of innovative solutions that optimise the workforce. Combining best-in-class technologies with an experienced team of consultants to offer businesses personalised workforce optimisation solutions, Call Design empowers your employees, engages customers, and automates everyday work processes with seamless implementation aimed at enhancing efficiencies at every level of an organisation.
Blog Source: Business Wire
Move Over Millennials, Generation Z is Here
Just when companies were starting to feel confident in their understanding of Millennials, along comes a new generation entering the workforce — Generation Z. Loosely defined as those born between 1994 and 2010, Gen Zers have unique characteristics that companies will need to learn about and accommodate. Considered to be the first generation of digital natives, Gen Zers were born and raised with high-speed internet, smartphones, instant and unlimited access to news and social media. And by 2020 Gen Zers comprised 32 percent of the world’s population, surpassing millennials as the largest age group.
Attracting these technologically proficient workers requires attention now. With 83% of students today considering it appropriate to spend less than three years at their first job and 27% believing it is appropriate to stay for less than one year, it will take a strong understanding of what makes Gen Zers tick to create and maintain the high-level of engagement necessary to not only attract them, but to keep them motivated to stay.
Here are some of the defining traits of Generation Z:
- “The” mobile and social generation
- Value availability and transparency
- Crave instant information and consume it at incredible speeds
- Prefer to communicate with icons and images, short bursts of content
- Appreciate simplicity, personalised experiences
- Require perpetual, self-paced learning and continuous feedback
- Like collaboration and competition
- Want instant gratification, enjoy rewards and recognition by supervisors and peers
- Need technology to keep pace
Gamification, the use of game mechanics to improve employee productivity, efficiency, and engagement, provides an excellent platform for addressing all of these traits. Take a closer look at each of them and see what your company can do, today, to prepare for Generation Z.
“The” mobile and social generation / Value availability and transparency
Gen Zers reach for their cell phones about every 7 minutes. Their phone is their preferred way of staying informed and keeping in touch with the latest updates on everything, including what’s happening in the company they work in. They demand availability and transparency and quickly become disillusioned without them. Be sure that your business applications are mobile-ready and can be accessed easily by your employees whenever they want and wherever they are.
The top three social networks for Gen Zers are Snapchat (42.0 million), TikTok (37.3 million), and Instagram (33.3 million). Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Reddit also have relatively large followings. Their reach will continue to grow steadily as Gen Z ages out of popular teen platforms. Although some Gen Zers are considering taking a break from the general usage of some of today’s social networks, they will seek out new ones. For this reason, it is important to keep abreast of new networks as they emerge. Also, Gen Zers still follow brands and consume branded content. Companies wanting to attract and retain these employees should have a defined social engagement strategy that includes a presence on several social networks as well as an internal social channel for disseminating company content and encouraging two-way communication.
A gamification platform that can be accessed from a mobile device keeps Gen Zers connected to the company at all times. It sends notifications to employees on all activities in near real-time and provides the level of availability and transparency that these newcomers need to stay engaged and feel part of the corporate community. Gamification can also be used to encourage the use of internal and external social networks by rewarding employees for their efforts.
Instant information / Short bursts of content / Simple and personalised
Gen Z employees are impressively good at multitasking. They banter routinely and consume information exceptionally quickly. The constant deluge of data has reduced their attention span to just 8.25 seconds. Fast Company characterises it as a “highly evolved eight-second filter,” citing their expertise for rapidly sorting and assessing the massive amount of content that is always at their fingertips.
Since Gen Zers usually engage with several sources at one time, they prefer to receive their content in short bursts. They also prefer applications that are well designed — optimised and personalised, clean and uncluttered. They are used to consumer apps and expect enterprise applications to have a similar sleek and simple design with icons and images versus wordy descriptions and long paragraphs of text.
Gamification dashboards aggregate performance stats and the most important information in one location. The simple design with large fonts, icons, and colours prioritises data and makes it easy to read at a glance. Employees can even access CRM, WFM, and speech analytics content from the same screen.
In addition, employees can personalise their dashboard by creating their own persona, adding pictures and choosing their own wallpaper and avatar. They can also decide who they want to share information with through their profile.
Perpetual, self-paced learning and continuous feedback
Generation Zers like to be in control of their own destiny. They are fiercely independent, resourceful and prefer on-demand learning. An e-library with online courses, tutorials, and training documents that can be accessed and completed any time is attractive to this self-directed generation. When Gen Zers are provided with self-paced training options, they feel empowered and are more engaged and happier. Opportunity for on-going learning is also important. Gen Zers are not afraid of working hard to achieve success and advancement.
Although they are self-reliant when it comes to training, Gen Zers also crave unbiased and continuous feedback. They want goals to be clear and they want to know how well they are performing against their goals and peers at all times.
When one of the nation’s largest student loan servicers started using gamification to train their contact centre agents, they compared completion rates of two groups – one that trained through the gamification platform and one that trained without gamification. Those that trained through gamification had a 184% higher completion rate than those that didn’t.
The right gamification platform allows for perpetual, self-paced learning. The solution tracks all learning activity and rewards completion. Gamification also provides continuous feedback. On the personalised dashboard, employees can see how they are performing relative to all their KPIs and how they are trending toward their goals. They can also see how well they are doing compared to their peers. This is ideal for Gen Zers because it allows them to course-correct on their own, ask their supervisor for coaching when they see they are underperforming, and even reach out for help to colleagues that are strong in the areas that they are weak.
Collaboration and competition
In an article about what Generation Zers expect from their workplace, a university student indicated that she is looking for a company that values collaboration and experimentation. Gen Zers also embrace collaborative and social learning to develop skills and experiences that help them solve problems and improve performance faster. They are also competitive. They like to clearly understand what is required of them and then they set out to achieve it. They are driven to succeed and want to be the first to finish the task, meet the goal, and win the prize.
Gamification is highly effective at keeping Gen Zers engaged through both individual and collaborative contests and competitive ideation strategies. These types of activities build a strong sense of community and help to accelerate learning and success. With gamification, employees always know where they stand and how much farther they need to go to achieve their goals.
Instant gratification / Rewards and recognition
Generation Z is accustomed to getting instant information at any time. Along with instant information, they want instant results and gratification. Technology has made this possible, and Gen Zers have come to expect it. In addition, Gen Zers like to be rewarded and recognized for their accomplishments. And they don’t want to wait too long for that either.
Gamification provides a constant stream of updated information. Notifications make everyone aware when there are new messages, updates to task completion and stats on how well employees are doing against goals and their peers. These updates are available instantaneously to managers as well which allows them to recognize team members for accomplishments and reach out with a congratulatory note immediately. Leaderboards throughout the facility keep everyone apprised, giving peers an opportunity to send their congratulations as well. This can energize and motivate employees to achieve even greater levels of performance.
Another attribute of gamification is the ability to break down goals into smaller objectives in order to create milestone targets to reward and recognize accomplishments more often. This helps to provide the instant gratification Gen Zers crave.
Technology that keeps pace
Generation Z may seem impatient to employers. That’s not really an accurate assessment. As we’ve already established, this generation was born and raised in the digital world. As a result of the availability of faster and faster technology, information on whatever is desired has always been available instantly, anywhere, from any device. Employers trying to attract Gen Zers need to be mindful that manual processes, siloed databases, and outdated technology will not cut the mustard.
By providing a sophisticated gamification platform that connects with other enterprise applications and communication programs, you can appeal to Gen Z’s need for speed and technology that keeps up with their demands.
Shifting expectations reveals a skills gap
The proliferation of technology and automated processes that do more of the work that humans used to do means that many jobs waiting for Generation Z professionals will require a higher level of critical thinking. They will also require interpersonal skills, and while many Gen Zers are technology savants, they tend to be deficient in their ability to develop and maintain interpersonal relationships.
Gamification software is ideal for training and coaching on virtually any type of desired behaviour. Games can be created to nurture the “soft” skills such as communication and interpersonal aptitude that Gen Zers may need to develop. Fabio Viola, an education coordinator of the Master in Engagement & Gamification at the IED of Milan, expects that with Gen Z entering the workforce, “a good part of the investment over the next few years will be in the gamification enterprise.”
What are you doing to motivate and manage generation Z employees?
Blog source: Alvaria
5 Ways Contact Centre Automation Improves Efficiency
With real time automation you can improve efficiency and create a better customer experience for both customers and staff. The software connects to both your contact centre platform and your workforce management system enabling it to monitor queues and update schedules with changes in real time.
Automation is a game-changer for the contact centre industry. Learn more about the benefits that it provides below:
Time-Saving
Contact centre processes can be time-consuming, with manual tasks such as finding times for training and updating schedules taking up a lot of the workforce planner’s time. Real Time Analysts and/or Team Leaders often spend a lot of time on admin-based tasks that add little value and reward.
That’s where intelligent automation solutions such as Intradiem come into play. This tool monitors queues in your contact centre platform as well as the schedules in your workforce management system. It updates schedules in real time if staff are late or don’t show up and can schedule short training sessions at times with low customer demand. This reduces the amount of time required to schedule or reschedule training, helping improve training efficiency by delivering more of it online.
Increased Productivity
If your staff are productive and engaged, it is much more likely that they will deliver a positive customer experience.
Automation helps staff be more productive. It can prompt agents into their lunch or end of shift before they get stuck on a long call. It can also send them a prompt if they go beyond established thresholds for sufficient ACW time or AHT with an offer to help.
Cost Savings!
Intelligent automation enables contact centres to lower costs by increasing productivity and providing a quick return on investment.
Improved Accuracy
By automating the process of updating schedules with the latest changes in real time, the workforce planning team have access to much more accurate information to make decisions about other activities that they may be trying to schedule such as team meetings, overtime or letting staff take last minute leave.
Report on Savings
Our intelligent automation solution lets you track and report on savings as they occur. See trends in AHT, shrinkage and occupancy and how changes to these have saved you money.
These are just some of the benefits of using Intelligent automation in your contact centre. To learn more about automation and how Intradiem software can help you, contact our friendly team today.
5 Powerful Capabilities of Gamification
Gamification is one of the most effective methods for contact centres to develop an engaging learning experience for employees to learn new skills and connect their actions to business outcomes. By encouraging workplace competition and collaboration, you can help agents improve productivity levels, produce a greater quality of work, and accurately achieve company goals and objectives.
Gamification learning connects employees to business goals with progress bars, leader boards, and quick and easy learning that rewards achievements. According to recent studies, gamification has helped contact centres improve employee motivation by as much as 83% and productivity by 89%. Many valuable capabilities of gamification software relate to Gen Z and future generations like never before, reinforcing technology's power and underlying capabilities in contact centres. Let’s explore five significant capabilities of gamification in more detail:
- Builds Employee Engagement
A recent study by McKinsey identified that engaged contact centre employees are 8.5 times more likely to stay at an organisation than leave within their first year. Happy agents are more likely to provide customers with a better experience therefore focusing on their engagement is important. Providing incentives and team competition can help keep engagement and motivation levels high.
- Encourages Agent Development
According to the 2022 Smaart Recruitment Contact Centre Best Practice report, 56% of agents want to follow a career path towards either a specialised role in the contact centre or stay with the organisation but in a different area. By offering continuous training and development of staff, the likelihood of people staying with the organisation is much higher. Gamification can be used to help develop staff skills and enable them to strive towards new goals. The longer they stay with the organisation, the better it is therefore investing in their development is key.
- Empowers Employees
Providing your employees with a sense of advancement and purpose can be achieved with regular personal development and upskilling. The introduction of gamification can help build a competitive and entertaining element to training programs that might otherwise be perceived as boring. Gamification’s ability to maintain employee motivation by setting new goals to strive towards and building on existing and new skills should not be overlooked.
When agents feel empowered and engaged, they provide a higher quality of service which makes the entire customer interaction a better experience. The same goes for celebrating the success of agents, employees feel appreciated and empowered.
- Shows Commitment to Teams
When management provides support and a level of care to agents, employees are more likely to reciprocate with a higher quality of work. By recognising staff and providing them with this support using the gamification tools, it shows the organisation is committed to their staff.
- Provides Performance Insights
Another benefit of gamification is its ability to provide performance insights. Team leaders and management can easily see who is meeting targets and who needs some additional coaching and training.
If you are looking for new ways to create sustainable changes that are going to positively impact your staff performance and engagement, gamification is the solution for your business. Contact our friendly team at Call Design today.
How to Use Gamification to Engage Remote Teams
Disconnected? Disinterested? Not sure how everything fits anymore? These are often the sentiments expressed as working from home employees reshuffle pandemic style and adapt. Those who have worked at home know how hard it is to remain motivated and attentive throughout the entire day. Managers looking to mitigate these added challenges can seek solutions to help staff adapt to the environment and increase engagement and motivation.
The declining efficiency of hybrid models and remote teams is costing thousands of businesses millions every year in productivity. In a recent study, 25% of recipients found their virtual teams were not fully productive. As the pandemic shows no end in sight, operations managers need to employ solutions such as gamification to boost productivity.
So how does gamification help? Here are ways contact centres can harness the power of gamification to boost performance and engagement in remote teams.
- Improve Employee Retention
The job market within Australia is becoming difficult to navigate, with the number of staff outweighing the number of people looking for work. While many companies report substantial revenue increases, they cannot grow their workforce as required. In addition to this, the cost of onboarding is substantial. To combat this, keeping staff engaged and happy at work so that they stay is important. Gamification can help with this. One association that was able to highlight this is where a renowned provider of merchant processing services—Sekure Merchant implemented Alvaria Motivate. The company averages 120,000+ outbound calls a day and needed an intuitive solution to improve operational efficiency and agent and team leader productivity on essential key performance indicators across all employee levels. Alvaria created four distinct user interfaces that aligned features to each level of Sekure Merchant’s organisational hierarchy. The solution was aimed at clearly and quantifiably displaying goals for each agent, team leader and manager. With Alvaria Motivate, the company witnessed more transparency in realizing their goals and could also achieve improved management efficiency. For every 100 agents, they gained 10 hours of management efficiency per week. Additionally, they realized a 62 percent increase in employee retention. The company is now unifying all their motivational management activities through a single interface.
- Ability to Refine Employee Training
Training new employees is difficult when working remotely. Teaching through screensharing and phone calls limits an agent’s ability to learn and fully absorb all the information. Using gamification in the training process helps to keep staff more engaged and motivated, ultimately leading to a better customer experience.
Utilising gamification software is an adaptive and engaging way to portray information to stimulate human senses. Many of Australia's largest contact centres have opted to use gamification-based training to improve engagement and employee retention as well as combat challenges associated with working from home.
- Increase Engagement to Boost Performance
Engagement is arguably one of the biggest challenges associated with staff working from home and is a key driving factor of productivity within a contact centre. Successful contact centres that constantly look for new ways to improve engagement and reach KPIs have directed their attention towards gamification.
Team Leaders can make training more engaging, which yields lower training costs and a better customer experience. The data also provides insight into what rewards agents want and what support they need to stay engaged and meet goals.
Gamification has become the choice amongst many large and small contact centres as adapting to the new macro-environment is a top priority to drive productivity. As everyone in the contact centre continues to adjust to changing work restrictions, gamification software presents the most cost-effective and interactive method to boost engagement and performance.
If you are looking for additional ways to manage remote teams effectively, contact our expert consultants at Call Design today. We can help your contact centre grow to new heights.
Why Contact Centres Must Accelerate Their Digital Transformation Strategies
A new wave of technology adoption is closing the gap in contact centre operations and shaping how agents perform on a day-to-day basis. While older, legacy systems are common, many contact centres are adopting new digital strategies to elevate productivity and manage unpredicted surges in call volume. Delivering a personalised customer service experience is also critical to cater to customer preferences which can be achieved much easier by implementing the latest and greatest technology rather than trying to use workarounds in some of the older systems.
Solutions such as IVRs, intelligent automation, Workforce Engagement Management, and the relative ease of implementing cloud-based applications have empowered contact centres to increase efficiency despite the current climate. Various studies have illustrated that companies who were able to excel through the pandemic were those who accelerated their digital transformation strategy and ultimately reaped the rewards.
The market for providing a high-quality customer experience has become increasingly difficult in recent years. Due to the expansive growth of e-commerce and the currently tight Australian labour market, contact centres are receiving more and more workload with a smaller workforce, requiring contact centre agents to work at much higher efficiencies.
The prevalence of Omicron has also highlighted that reduced numbers of agents requires better technology and systems to help cater for the workload when people unexpectedly call in sick.
Greater Flexibility
While restrictions within Australia differ from state-to-state and continuously change, employing flexible workplace management models has proven to be the most effective course of action. Managing people from home or in the office, and keeping rosters up to date can be very challenging. While these workplace arrangements allow the service process to remain uninterrupted through change, the amount of administration required to run such an operation takes managers' attention away from big-ticket items, such as customer satisfaction scores, and agent engagement.
Technology solutions allow managers to automate much of their administrative tasks and focus on contact centre strategy execution. Tools such as intelligent automation that work with your workforce management solution to process changes as soon as they need to happen are among the more valuable improvements a contact centre can make to their operational efficiency.
Better Support Agents
Growing a workforce at the same rate as the demand for digital customer service is a difficult, if not impossible task, which is why agents are being asked to take on more types of contact and work at higher efficiencies than ever before. By increasing the workload beyond a certain level, burnout becomes inevitable and eventually feeds a growing employee turnover rate. With all agent performance, there is a sustainable level at which agents perform at their best without burning out.
By employing technology solutions that support agents with their workload, contact centres can raise the sustainable threshold without increasing the risk of burnout. Solutions such as IVR systems and Intelligent Automation allow basic tasks to be simplified or handled by a computer. IVRs can handle simple calls and Intelligent automation can be used to help staff immediately they need it and keep their schedules up to date. Effectively delegating this work allows agents to focus on more critical elements of the customer experience rather than simple data entry.
Analyse Customer Service at a Higher Degree
Improving the customer service quality has traditionally been a game of subjective analysis by team leaders or quality analysts. Without the use of technology, a contact centre manager can only analyse the CX performance of one agent at a time, and to the personal preference of that manager. This conventional approach to improving the customer service experience makes improvements stagnant, thereby hindering the ability for companies to grow.
Quality Management software helps agents improve the customer service experience on the go and to the preference of both the customer and the contact centre manager.
By infusing the knowledge of contact centre managers and the quantitative capabilities of software, contact centres can refine their customer service delivery to a much higher degree.
Efficiently Manage Workforces
Ensuring that labour costs do not blow out, break times are optimised, and agents are engaged and managed effectively is hard to achieve on a large scale. A very traditional approach to workforce management involves using excel spreadsheets (particularly in small centres) and only uncovering performance issues reactively rather than proactively.
Technology solutions such as Alvaria WFM allow contact centre managers to analyse performance data and make real-time adjustments as required. Problems can be identified promptly, and changes can be made before they negatively affect the bottom line. This enables workforce managers to fine-tune schedules to provide a more efficient contact centre operation.
Build Workplace Aligned Engagement
Having an engaged workforce is important for contact centres to remain relevant to the current market. Due to the low supply of labour within Australia, contact centres need to base their workforce management strategies around lowering turnover rates. Improving workforce engagement and employee workplace culture are some of the biggest factors affecting turnover rate.
While there are many ways contact centre managers can improve engagement, very few methods channel improvements towards contact centre goals. By incorporating gaming elements into the training process, a task that would once be described as monotonous can now be more interesting. Gamification software is one of the most widely adopted technologies across the industry, allowing agents to enjoy gaming elements throughout their training process and feel engaged at work. This software has played a prominent role in many successful businesses and continues to grow with the expanding demand.
While the market may be challenging for contact centres to navigate, the latest technology solutions provide growth to companies looking to accelerate their performance and an opportunity to sustainably increase agent efficiency and performance. Companies who have ambitious growth targets must look past the up-front costs of new technology adoption and understand the value it can bring to a contact centres’ longevity.
Call Design sources best-in-breed solutions to help contact centres elevate performance through technology adoption. Should you or your contact centre want to know more about how any of our solutions can improve your contact centre, speak to our friendly team today.
Building A Modern Engagement-Centric Workforce
Changing customer preferences and volatile market behaviour have forced customer service teams to deploy greater agility to remain relevant in meeting customer enquiries. The need to rethink how contact centres operate has become topical over the last few years, in part due to contact centres moving slowly into digital transformation.
While agent tasks can be monotonous, building strong engagement underpins continual improvement of the customer service experience. Like most workplaces, high performance comes as a by-product of high engagement channelled by productive management.
Managers who micro-manage based on instantaneous KPIs demonstrate a lack of willingness to evaluate performance on a broader scale and frequently overlook engagement's importance and long-lasting benefits. A highly motivated and engaged workforce delivers a more personalised customer experience and elevates handling time and workplace efficiencies.
Start with Engagement
When companies look to make significant operational improvements, it’s crucial to master the basics and ensure a strong foundation for growth. Engagement is the most important factor for managers looking to advance contact centre KPIs. If your contact centre also wants to increase its customer service satisfaction score, managers can coach agents to amplify customer service quality, and provide constructive feedback to improve performance. When managers focus on building engagement and set new KPIs, agents can actively seek new methods to upskill and effectively absorb information to create an engaging service.
Engagement Empowers Agility
Over the past 18 months, contact centres have had to employ greater agility and flexibility than ever before to continue delivering a high-quality customer service. While managers can train agents through different methods, the absorption and willingness to learn is determined by agent engagement and motivation to learn and upskill. Since contact centre agility continues to correlate with performance directly, managers should drive engagement as a means to creating agile agents.
Improving Engagement
Engagement can be developed within contact centres in a multitude of ways, although not all will align with specific performance goals. With this in mind, contact centre managers are empowered to consider an array of methods to build engagement.
One method of boosting engagement is organising activities outside of the work environment, such as a staff party, going to an Escape room, or having a team dinner at a local restaurant. These forms of engagement building events are compelling and demonstrate a commitment to employees.
Another method of building engagement that is pivoting is gamification. By incorporating gaming elements into the training and assessment process, agents receive a break from regular workload and can be stimulated with a game-aligned with building skills relevant to contact centre’s goals.
The Power of Gamification
The adoption of gamification in contact centre’s is running full throttle – because it works! A recent Gartner report shows that more than 70% of businesses within the Global 2000 list have adopted gamification to improve employee engagement. This is a true testimony to the value obtained by implementing gamification.
With gamification, agents can be stimulated through audio and visual cues and interact with a game aligned with contact centre growth. Contact centres worldwide are seeing advances in training effectiveness, and gamification is the answer. Did you know that 72% of the workforce believes gamification inspires them to work harder? Gamification boosts engagement and creates a scalable and customisable method to engage, motivate, and coach employees, thereby making it one of the most valuable investments a contact centre can make.
Within the current market climate, it’s critical to boost engagement to drive other areas of improvement within contact centres. While there are many ways in which contact centres can elevate engagement, gamification continues to be the most effective in terms of cost and alignment to goals and KPIs. Call Design offers some of the most comprehensive gamification solutions in the contact centre industry, allowing contact centres in any industry to grow business and amplify customer service. For enquiries about gamification and how your contact centre can use utilise the capabilities, speak to our professional team at Call Design.