#1: Back-Office WFO Series: Three Tips to Designing a Forecast Task List
Providing the business with a robust forecast is the number one challenge when implementing WFM into the back-office space.
“WFM is the art and science of scheduling the right number of people with the right skills, at the right time, to handle work within service level, and within budget” the key factor to getting this right is to make staffing related decisions based off the forecasted workload demand.
The number one failing when implementing WFM into the back office is workload forecasting. All too often, forecasting lands in the ‘too hard basket’ and people end up making ‘off the cuff’ staffing decisions that impact the customer and the business. There is, however, a light at the end of the tunnel. It takes a little more effort and time to get your forecasting right, but the payoff is irrefutable.
Here are a few tips to help you establish your forecasting program.
1. Forecasting Expertise
- If utilising a contact centre forecasting expert be sure they are skilled in the varying back-office practices and processing rhythms. Back-office work is handled differently, so be sure these differences are factored in.
- Never assume to know - always ask. Leaders, 2IC’s and SMEs know the work better than anyone else so be sure to ask them questions about anomalies and complexities. This process improves confidence, believability, and acceptance from leaders.
- Workflow solutions are not always designed to ‘plug and play’ in WFM. Always validate the task list at the actual processing level. You may need to consider variables in the same tasks that impact processing time. Be sure to look at the available information in detail.
- Don’t try to design a forecast for every team to begin with. Work through one team at a time. Once you have the first forecast right, you can fast track team implementation using a similar format. Always remember to watch out for those task variables that need to be considered in each team.
- Present forecasting as a useful tool that can help leaders make better staffing decisions. Good forecasting takes a lot of the guess work out of decision making so help your team leaders use it to their advantage.
2. Forecasting Task Structure Considerations
- Don’t forget work that is conducted but is not captured in a system (or anywhere).
- Consider processing time and service level when grouping tasks.
- Incorrect blending of work can impact your ability to service within an agreed timeframe. Think of the customer.
- Available reporting information can help simplify the task lists and mix. Use what is already available.
- Take your time. As added information emerges, reverse engineer the task list to predict future impacts.
Revise, review, and revalidate as needed. Valid mapping of all tasks is crucial.
3. Team Engagement
- Involving the right staff is a critical step to getting the task list right and building a strong forecast. There’s no point creating a forecast if the leaders have no confidence in the numbers. Inclusion is guaranteed to help define and refine, a robust forecasting list.
Building a task list that is utilised to create a usable workload forecast takes time. Forecasting is one of the most valuable tools in WFM that provides leaders with the confidence to make appropriate staffing decisions and allows for more robust financial and future planning.
Author: Laura Horton, Senior Consultant at Call Design.
5 Things To Consider When Designing Your Gamification
Boosting employee motivation, training effectiveness, and quality of output can all be done by an ingenious method called gamification. Gamification refers to incorporating gaming elements into the training process or other elements of a workplace to diversify and improve the agent development.
Gamification doesn't just improve the working and training processes of agents; it also allows managers to better track and adjust training to accommodate for employees based on their performance.
While a large proportion of recent studies have shown that gamification can improve KPIs in virtually every touchpoint of a contact centre, there are still dozens of areas of consideration that need to be evaluated to provide an effective gamification system. Read on to discover what they are.
1. Look Long-Term
With any system, not just gamification, it's crucial to outline and understand the long-term benefits. Understand what problem you want to solve with its implementation. Employing systems based on short-term problem resolution can have large long-term implications. The saying, "everything in moderation", definitely rings true in this circumstance. Start small and test the waters. Pick one thing and build from there, developing more sophisticated ways of using the solution as you learn from your agents about what works best. You will get more from a system that is continuously updated as it will keep your agents engaged.
2. Understand the Value in Rewards
Rewards are among the biggest motivators throughout gamification; it incentivises good performance and constantly encourages agents to better themselves throughout the training process. There are two big things to bear in mind when designing your gamification systems, one is not to overemphasise rewards, and two, to moderate the number of rewards.
If a gamification system overemphasises rewards, this alludes to the idea that an agent can only perform successfully by hitting their numbers, when in reality, there are many other aspects to good agent performance. An over-emphasis on rewards can see agents focus too much on their KPIs and begin to feel like robots. As a result, customer service quality can drop, and agents can lose engagement and not take it seriously.
Levelling up is a way to keep agents motivated to move through content organised in a specific progression. It requires completion or mastery of one level before getting access to the next. Levels typically increase in difficultly as the game progresses and require skills acquired in all previous levels. Levelling up plays to the user’s drive to conquer harder tasks and their desire for higher recognition and reward.
3. Encourage Problem-Solving
As previously mentioned, not everything goes to plan. Especially when many things go wrong at once, or there is an overabundance of uncertainty at any given time, agents may be required to act like a supervisor or a manager. Therefore, developing good problem-solving skills, which improve an agent's ability to think laterally, is important for contingency planning and setting agents up for future promotion or career progression.
Through its immersive training platform, gamification solutions can help develop enhanced problem-solving abilities and integrate lateral problem solving to see agents handle uncertain or difficult situations without needing the assistance of a manager.
4. Track and Report
Tracking and reporting plays an important role in gamification success. On the front end, it can reveal areas where agents can improve the quality of their interactions with customers. On the backend the reporting can track and measure the agents’ performance to determine progress and goal attainment which will help you identify tweaks that need to be made and when new goals need to be gamified.
5. Playtest and Market Internally
Playtesting throughout the gamification design process provides insight as to whether goals are being achieved. When the game is ready, playtest with a small group to identify any bugs and to ensure the game is driving the correct behaviours. Also encourage these people to spread the word about the game and to build excitement within the centre so that when it is launched, staff are engaged and excited about it.
If you would like to find out more about our gamification solution, speak to our professional consultants today.
Getting Data from your WFM System
Which is better Direct Query or Webservice?
This is a question that is asked a lot in businesses where data needs to be extracted from various sources and collated. As technology and security increase, so too does the tightening around access and use of said data, especially within the contact centre. Traditionally, this access was analogous, and extracts could be run either by direct user access or via an application middleware, but these processes are changing.
As more and more components of contact centre solutions move to web applications, access to the data for other reporting and external teams has been moved into webservices and away from direct database access. But what is the difference in how you get your data and which method is right for your circumstance?
Security
Most systems now have a web application and APIs that will allow some, if not all, required data to be collected and aggregated via a webservice.
WFM systems are no different but accessing this data can vary from team to team. Direct database access usually requires users or services to have direct, set access to the database. This can be deemed a security risk as these credentials can create multiple entry points to the data in the backend.
A webservice can minimise this risk by allowing an additional business layer that can handle multiple users and accounts and limit access to only what the webservice requires. Whilst this may not be for every scenario, most webservices calls are suitable for the reporting requirements for WFM, easing the security concerns that requesting a service account with direct access can put on the database.
Maintenance
WFM systems have been revamping to cater for shifting industry standards in how contact centres are servicing their agents and this overhaul has seen many backend changes happen over a short period of time. This requires a lot of additional work for integrated platforms and systems that connect directly to the database, which can at times result in multiple software upgrades or middleware connectors being required or changed as a result. Whilst nothing is forever, a webservice call may be a better option, giving you some flexibility in being able to change the call’s connection rather than the entire integrated system.
Direct connections may result in quicker processing which in turn are more beneficial for some basic report outputs, but integrations pertaining to some more glacial systems, such as payroll or ACD integrations, that are not likely changing, could have some more serious ramifications, with entire connectors or middleware requiring an overhaul. Being able to dynamically redirect any backend changes to these systems via the webservices, could save both time and money as you route the relevant data to the unchanged systems, for them, as if nothing had changed.
Scalability
Many clients directed to one database can cause bottlenecking, slow speed, and impact overall query performance, especially in multi tenanted and large WFM environments. Traditionally, there are methods for scaling out and making the data accessible via direct connectivity - replication, shared databases repositories, etc., which all require some additional overhead and server costs. As environments start to streamline and move to SAAS models, these costs become more obvious as the other WFM infrastructures become more efficient.
As your contact centre grows, so too do the connections of integrated components and the continuous exporting of data required in near real time, making it more difficult to setup synchronised environments for external systems to access. Webservices have their own consequences, with persistent connections more common to direct access querying and slower processing times as webservices get more complex. The business layer however allows for load balancing options to help with distribution and the ability to have different versions and languages of the same service. This provides added flexibility for your environment and integrated systems based on your provider’s preferences.
In conclusion, webservices offer better security, less maintenance and better scalability when getting data from your WFM system.
Written by Leon Breakenridge – Technical Services Specialist
Why Gamification Is Critical To Customer Service
The customer service we experience today and our expectations of it are vastly different from what it was two years ago. As many brands no longer have physical stores and in-person sales representatives, building strong customer service through their contact centres has become essential.
As an extenuating number of brands have made the transition and upscaled their contact centre resources, providing differentiation between brands at this level has become increasingly difficult. The demands that customers hold on reputable brands and their customer service team has increased tenfold. As e-commerce looks to remain a dominant force for the foreseeable future, building a contact centre that can handle both the demands in quality and increased quantity remains the crucial challenge for contact centre managers.
Pressure on Customer Service
The importance of a good customer service experience is undisputed, especially during the pandemic, as the contact centre may have been one of the only interactions a customer had with a business. As a result, the way a customer views your organisation could rest entirely upon their interaction with your customer support team.
The pressures upon contact centres to produce high quality, fast, and engaging experiences is increasing by the day. A customer can easily identify the difference between an engaged agent and one that is not so it is important to make sure your staff have the training and skills they need to keep them motivated.
Building Engagement
Staff engagement in the contact centre is hugely important. Handling time, customer service scores, and energy displayed throughout the query represent important elements that can help brands succeed and build meaningful relationships with their customers.
Improving agent engagement in your contact centre can lead to a raft of benefits:
• A reduction in sick leave
• Greater agent satisfaction
• Higher agent retention
• Lower gross agent training costs
• Higher customer satisfaction scores
• Higher self-motivation
Building engagement and improving productivity simultaneously is however no easy feat.
Channel Engagement
Gamification represents one of the fastest growing methods of building engagement with 60% of agents reporting that they felt more engaged after gamification had been introduced into their training and work. Gamification allows contact centre managers to build engagement by appealing to a larger array of emotions, using more senses, and adding rewards and point scoring elements into the training process.
While building engagement within any workplace is relatively easy with increased breaks, rotating tasks, and other small activities, most of them lead to decreased productivity and lost focus on the task at hand. It is for this very reason that gamification has become so popular all over the world. These small gaming elements that might seem mindless and off-task are specially designed to improve agents' performance and sculpt the perfect customer service experience while they play the game.
Gamification solutions are extremely customisable and integrate with existing training procedures and KPI measuring systems. No matter the industry that a contact centre services, gamification can keep agents on task, continually learning and most importantly engaged.
As the demand in quality and quantity of customer service continues to increase, solutions such as gamification play an important role in developing contact centres for the future. Gamification impacts the quality-of-service delivery in two direct ways:
1. It Models the 'Perfect' Customer Experience
Throughout the training process, agents are taught what the perfect customer experience looks like by watching others or learning from customer service handbooks. Neither of which allows for an immersive experience and a complete comprehension of providing a positive customer experience.
Gamification allows agents to engage more of their senses throughout the training process and practice delivering a positive service before being presented with actual clients.
2. Gamification Builds Engagement
A more engaged agent conveys more energetic emotions throughout the experience. They are more aware of the customer needs, and are more motivated to handle customer queries faster and with higher quality.
Through a variation of activities, gamification instantaneously builds engagement and improves the customer service experience.
As the increased demands for quality and quantity of customer service show no signs of slowing down, contact centre managers must build engagement designed to last and continue growing with the customer's demands. Gamification represents one of the most cost effective and effective methods of building engagement in the contact centre. Companies worldwide are turning to gamification as the next best means of improving their output and efficiencies and 40% of the Global 1000 organisations are already using gamification.
If your contact centre is looking to improve its operations and deliver a higher quality of customer service, speak to our professional consultants to discover the potential of Call Design's gamification solutions.
How People Are Equally As Important As Systems
With digital transformation in full flight, the central focus amongst virtually every manager is employing solutions that drive efficiency. While this focus has worked for some time, the relationship between employees and technology is more complicated than it would seem.
Development in technology has empowered growth in every corner of our society, and in ways we would have never been able to imagine. Software and hardware have enabled operations to dramatically improve, ensuring employees complete simple and administratively cumbersome tasks faster than ever. While investing in technology and software development has enabled contact centres to grow faster than ever, investing in people is equally as important to keep staff engaged and productive.
Changing Consumer Landscape
Strong growth in the e-commerce sector and lockdowns worldwide have been the primary driver for increased contact centre customer service demand. During the pandemic, e-commerce has grown by 77% year on year, and the trend looks to remain constant for years to come. While technology has helped large scale organisations boost revenue streams, the increased demand for products and services correlates with a surge in demand for better customer service.
As the demand for contact centre customer service has skyrocketed so too has the subsequent need for online assistance; something companies may have otherwise performed in-person pre-pandemic. As a result, wait times for customer service, dispatch times, and processing times of queries continues to climb. Due to this, many contact centre managers are looking at the best ways to keep staff engaged and optimised in both front and back office.
No Customer Support ROI
You can't put a price on customer service. While many studies have attempted to estimate the price of customer service and its direct impact on sales revenue, they always fall short of a conclusive result. There are hundreds of variables that change the impact of customer service on a business's branding and revenue performance. As a result, when companies look to cut costs and consolidate their expenses, customer service is often one of the first areas they turn to.
Successful companies have realised the value of strong customer service and invest heavily in it to ensure that staff have the skills and technology they need to do the best job possible.
Where Costs Amount
It's easy to cut costs and simply downscale your customer service model, but business leaders need to be aware that there comes a point when underfunding and trying to cut costs out of customer service can work against their business goals.
By underfunding a contact centre, agent turnover is likely to be higher, training costs increase, customer satisfaction scores fall, and many other KPIs may not be met. Recruitment and training costs can cost up to three times more than an annual salary. The evidence supports that high agent retention is crucial to contact centre profitability and business growth.
Use Technology In The Right Way
Many contact centres turn to technology to improve their performance and implement an IVR to route the calls to the correctly skilled agent. A complicated and hard to use menu however can significantly impact customer service scores. Situations like these commonly add even more work for the agent, slow down the processes, and damage customer relationships.
A better way to manage your agents when workload ramps up is to remember that they are human at the end of the day, and they can't always run at 100%. Technology should be implemented that will assist them to do their job rather than make it more complicated.
Well implemented IVR systems, intelligent automation to help with real time changes to schedules, and good workforce management solutions can all increase efficiency without increasing the load on an agent.
Intelligent automation is like having a virtual manager for every agent. The 'virtual manager' can monitor handling time, breaks and off phone time as well as queue performance to make quick management decisions and help staff perform better. A good workforce management tool lets staff view their schedules remotely, apply for leave and swap shifts as well as view their day to day performance to ensure they meet their KPIs.
The Relationship Between Technology and Human
Creating a successful contact centre involves using your technology to leverage the humanity of your organisation. Technology will always be trying to get more and more out of your staff however the more you consider the lives of your employees, the more successful your customer service operation will be.
While it's easy to say that you should build solutions around your labour's needs and existing capabilities, creating such systems and processes is far from easy. An in-depth understanding on how customer service agents work is crucial to building a contact centre designed to last. Call Design and their team of experienced professionals provide consulting and training on how to optimise your contact centre. If you are looking to improve the service you provide to your customers, get in contact with one of our professionals today.
How To Use Gamification To Improve CX In Your Contact Centre
High-quality professional customer support is crucial to building lasting customer relationships. Contact centres represent the voice of many organisations, existing as the first point of contact for customers engaging with your organisation. Ensuring agents are trained to the highest standard and represent the company’s personality, values, and characteristics in all communication remains paramount to a successful customer service model and company success but also by investing in upskilling your staff, they feel motivated and engaged.
Understanding that every agent is different, catering for their unique characteristics, behaviours, and preferred learning styles is vital to the training courses they do. Textbook knowledge, learning from presentations or listening to co-workers presents limitations when training agents. Gamification changes the game in the agent training space. Allowing contact centre managers to accommodate a more extensive range of learning styles provides a better guarantee of keeping staff engaged and learning.
While gamification is designed primarily to improve the engagement of agents, its effects upon customer service quality have already been illustrated. A recent study has shown that companies enjoy a 700% conversion rate when using gamification within their workplace. Better engaged agents are retained for longer, thereby building a better knowledge base within your contact centre. A highly knowledgeable workforce directly impacts the quality of customer service and the overall experience. An engaged workforce is more expressive and engaging throughout the customer service experience, creating a stronger connection with the customer and improving client relations.
Here are effective ways to use gamification within your contact centre to improve the quality of customer service.
Data Analytics
The contact centre industry is no different from any other and analysing big data allows managers to refine output more accurately than ever before. Within the contact centre, a couple of seconds can mean the difference between a good and bad customer service score. Thereby, training an agent to perfection is crucial to the performance of any contact centre.
Gamification allows you to manage metrics during the training process, enabling managers to understand the strengths and weaknesses of agents in a quantifiable manner. Metrics include:
• First call resolution
• Average speed to answer
• Average handle time
• Average after work time
• Customer satisfaction rate
• Schedule adherence
Understanding and analysing this data in the training process allows managers to refine the output and the processes. Analysing and using this data during the training process has enabled almost immediate improvement to bottom-line performance across several contact centres.
Constantly Change the Experience
If you keep giving the same type of training in the same way to agents, they will get bored. Mix it up. Create different groups- There are many ways to define groups once your agents are ready to tackle more sophisticated and multi-task / multi-player games. Obvious groups would be those by team, department etc. Other ways to make it more interesting is to create different groups such as those with a birthday that month, hair colour or names that begin with a certain letter. By doing this you can foster collaboration with groups of people who don’t normally work together.
Team Building
Nothing builds teams like some friendly competition. Working together to achieve a common goal through some friendly rivalry is a proven way to build teamwork. Gamification uses games and other activities to build teamwork within your contact centre. While these games may seem like a waste of time, designing team-based activities aligned with key training goals can see agents have fun and develop teamwork while simultaneously honing their contact centre skills.
A strong and successful team is essential to improving the quality of customer service. A well-developed team can support each other through high influxes of inbound customer queries and challenging times, thereby ensuring that the agents within your contact centre work together to improve the quality of customer service.
Replace Smaller Assessments With Gamification
Replacing small assessments within your contact centre can prove highly beneficial to your bottom line through a range of contributing factors. Due to its more immersive and engaging experience, Gamification better encapsulates your agents’ performance than stand-alone written tests. Using gamification as check-up assessments removes a great deal of the stress heading into testing, as the experience is seen as more casual and engaging. Incorporating gamification has already seen dramatic improvements to engagement, with a recent study showing that over 80% of people feel more engaged and happier at work.
Developing small gamification elements throughout an agent’s time has lasting effects on contact centre engagement. Small memory recognition games are an easy way to build variety into an agent’s employment, improving engagement and attentiveness.
Gamification has been gaining traction since 2010, with its positive effects on the industry becoming more apparent. Building engagement has become the central focus for the contact centre industry, as the quality of customer service is more valued than handling time.
Enveloping gamification is easy and yields positive results immediately amongst your workforce. For more information on gamification download our ebook https://calldesign.com.au/solutions/gamification or speak to our professional team at Call Design and discover more about how we can help you increase engagement and motivation in your contact centre.
The Best Way to Train and Guide Agents to Success
There is no better gauge as to the importance of customer experience when engaging with a brand’s contact centre than the millions of social media complaints that consumers have about their experience.
If agents don’t have proper training and tools, they are not only unable to do their jobs, but may be damaging your brand.
10 ways to really kick goals and create agent success include:
- Create a Plan
The value of having a well-developed and executed plan is paramount. Having a plan in place will consolidate all the learning and development required for an agent and progression within their roles. Incorporating industry best practice and key milestones is key, along with the continual updating and development of the plan to suit changing business environments and new ways of thinking.
- Continuous Training
Continuous training is key to a contact centre’s longevity and performance. Providing steady growth and development for your staff is crucial to maintaining KPIs. As technology and social circumstances change, training procedures must also keep up to date.
Most individuals need to be stimulated in their professional careers. By implementing solutions like gamification, training becomes more engaging and contact centres can deliver superior professional development. It has been shown that 94% of employees would have remained at a company for longer if their company invested more in their career development.
- Start Onboarding Before The First Call
By starting the onboarding process before an agent begins their time on the phones, they’re already familiar with the environment and are often less overwhelmed on their first day. This can include an introduction to the contact centre environment in the interview process.
According to Aberdeen Group, 83% of the highest-performing organisations began onboarding prior to an agent’s first day. Beginning the onboarding process beforehand lets managers use their time effectively by scheduling the simple and administrative tasks to be completed at home by an online automated system. By implementing an online onboarding process, contact centres can expect to see a dramatic improvement in training efficiency.
- Train and Refresh New and Existing Staff on the Power of One Principles
The "Power of One" is among the most important principles to introduce to new hires and reinforce with experienced agents. Regardless of the size of your contact centre, every agent has the power to influence customer perception, improve speed of answer, keep occupancy at a reasonable level, hold down your costs and in the end, maximize customer lifetime value. Unfortunately, many of your staff don’t realise this, so it is important to teach these principles during the onboarding process and continually refer to and reemphasize their importance to existing staff.
- Shadow Program
Creating a shadow learning program in your contact centre is a commonly used method of training new agents.
This method simultaneously achieves two important things:
1) it develops a sense of leadership amongst more experienced agents, builds employee engagement and opens doors for professional development
2) it gives agents a role model in the workforce, providing a model of their expectations and their professional pathway, while helping them learn soft skills that are harder to explicitly train.
By creating a shadow program, new agents have an opportunity to become familiar with the workplace culture. Research states that best-in-class organisations prioritise new agents and introduce them to their team early on in their training, resulting in revenue increases for full time employees of up to 17% due to its impact on employee training.
- Provide The Right Tools
Providing the right tools and technology is necessary for numerous reasons as they can significantly impact an employee’s experience of working in the contact centre. Mobile apps that enable staff to view their schedule, apply for leave and swap shifts, regardless of their location are a great way to make life easier for contact centre staff thus increasing their engagement.
Intelligent Automation can also improve the efficiency of the centre by making it easier for staff to adhere to their schedule. For example, if an agent is stuck on a call, intelligent automation can see that they are on a call and move their break to when the call ends thus removing the need for a team leader or Workforce Planner to do so. This helps improve staff engagement and efficiency in the centre.
- Clear Objectives (KPIs)
Setting clear objectives is very similar to creating a plan; it provides purpose and structure which is a key contributing factor to motivate employees and monitor progress. When setting out agent KPIs, they should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely) and clearly understood by the agent. By developing short-term and long-term KPIs, agents are provided with the necessary framework and guidance to accomplish high performance results.
- Feedback
Providing agent feedback is one of the most crucial aspects of any agent’s training. Without the correct feedback and guidance, agents will continue to use the knowledge they initially obtained rather than learning new things and adopting new approaches to improve efficiency and optimise performance. It’s found that 82% of employees appreciate both positive and negative feedback and use it to improve their performance and work towards exceeding customer expectations. Keep in mind that too much negative feedback is not good and will affect an employee’s confidence and experience.
- Vary Your Training Methods
Incorporating different methods of training is crucial to appeal to different learning types. The four typical learning methods are visual learners, auditory learners, kinaesthetic learners and reading/writing learners. Each of these learning methods responds differently to various training. As a result, it’s important to develop a comprehensive training program to utilise a wide range of learning methods.
- Team Meetings
Hosting regular team meetings is vital to building teamwork and collaborative learning in any workforce. Jobs within the contact centre industry can typically feel isolated by constantly responding to customer queries with minimal time for cross-team communication. Hosting meetings provides another dimension to an employee’s development within their role and further delivers the foundation and substance to build an inclusive and engaging workforce culture. It’s important to note that contact centres should give meetings a purpose and structure. Surveys show that 55% of people have wasted one or more hours within their week on pointless meetings, which is why it’s important to plan and create a meeting agenda.
How to Take Your WFM to the Next Level
If you’ve been in the contact centre space for more than a few hours, you’ve likely heard some version of the unofficial motto “Connecting the right interaction, to the right agent, at the right time.” For the workforce management team, we know that means we need to accurately forecast the interactions, schedule the agents, and real time manage the environment. These elements are the basics of WFM, but for some of us we’re wondering what else there is. What does it take to get to the next level of WFM?
We could look at “right interaction” and go after a stronger phone menu or IVR options. We can better define the interactions as they come into our contact centre and route them appropriately. Or we could focus on “right time”, concentrating on our forecast accuracy and schedule adherence. Making sure we know exactly when the interactions are coming in and what our agents are doing. All of this would clearly help our organisations and provide a benefit, but I believe they miss the mark when we’re looking to take WFM to the next level. Clearly this leaves one last thing to focus on “the right agent”.
How we understand our agents often comes from our KPIs and their metrics. We define our agents as “top producers” or “needs coaching”. We see them through the lens of the organisation, and we understand which agent should get which interaction based upon the impact on the bottom line. This is a fine place to start but it oversimplifies our agents. When we only view our agents from a productivity, performance, and customer experience perspective we miss out on the information that helps our WFM team become best in breed.
To get to the next level of WFM we should be considering the lives, families, needs, and hobbies of the agents as we forecast, schedule, and real time monitor. We should graduate from simply looking at net staffing when approving/denying PTO and begin to consider why someone needs the time off. This isn’t an argument for favouritism or valuing someone’s family reunion over someone else’s yoga class. This is an argument for an understanding that our agent’s ability to perform at work is directly tied to their lives outside of work.
Maybe you understand this, but you still find yourself having to choose who gets time off. In the end, you still feel like you’re picking person X over person Y because they have a better reason. One way to avoid this is by leveraging your WFM platform to give the agents any time off they want if they are willing to pay the cost. Your time off shrinkage could include time off that doesn’t cost the agent anything, time off that costs them X credits from an internal currency, and another bucket that costs them X times 3 credits. The higher your shrinkage goes the higher the cost. This allows you to get out of the business of approving a reunion over a yoga class and instead empowers the agents to decide if their activity is worth the cost.
The key to this working though, is you must have a program that allows them to earn as well as redeem this internal currency. You could consider allowing the agents to earn credits when they sign up for voluntary overtime or voluntary time off. As they build these banks of credits they are then empowered to decide if going to the yoga class is worth 4 credits, when it took 4 VTO hours to earn those credits. When we understand an agent’s performance is tied to their lives outside of work, we need to build policies and leverage technology that empowers them to make more choices.
Changing how we understand “the right agent” should also impact how we build our schedules. Simply because our WFM system wants to build a bunch of part time or split shift schedules doesn’t mean it’s ideal for your environment. We all know that we must balance the agent desires with the business desires. However, we base our agent desires on assumption “everyone wants Mon-Fri 8am-5pm”, but do they really? One way to make sure you are taking the agent’s needs into consideration is to ask them what they need or want.
Pulse surveys are a great way to get that feedback. Small surveys done on a regular basis can help you capture the voice of the employee and respond to them before the small issues become big ones. Sometimes that will mean adjusting if we provide three 12 hour shifts or possibly more split shifts. We cannot build schedules that meet business and agent needs if we don’t even know what the agents need.
Lastly, as WFM professionals we need to be willing to step up and help other leaders in our organisation see agents more complexly. We sit at the crossroads of many teams in our organisations. Interfacing with marketing, operations, human resources, finance, and technology. If we are going to elevate our WFM team by seeing agents as more than just numbers, we will have to make sure others in the organisation are doing the same. We will have to influence those we interact with to understand the agents are bringing their lives into work and their work into their lives. It may require a significant mindset shift for some of our organisations but moving from basic to next level is rarely easy, even though it’s always worth it.
Next level WFM must move from an oversimplification of our agents and begin to seem them complexly. It sees the lives, needs, and communities of our agents and brings them into consideration when we’re forecasting, scheduling, and real time monitoring. This doesn’t mean we let the agents do whatever they want, whenever they want, but it does mean that we lean into a fuller understanding of our workforce and embrace the fact that they are more than “top producers” or “needs coaching”.
Dan Smitley
DIRECTOR OF WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT AND ANALYTICS AT WORLD TRAVEL HOLDINGS
WINNER 2020 ICMI WORKFORCE PLANNER OF THE YEAR
5 Reasons Why You Need Gamification in Your Contact Centre Training
If you’re a manager within a sizable workforce, you’ve likely heard of gamification. This new type of technology has completely revolutionised the way training and management is conducted throughout the professional careers of your agents.
While gamification has only been around for a short time and used by large scale organisations, a growing wave of smaller workplaces appear to be adopting this technology in recent years. Gamification isn’t anywhere near as expensive as it used to be, especially with more industry-specific companies focusing on providing accessible solutions. It’s now easier than ever to integrate this technology into your contact centre with immediate and impressive results.
The commitment to gamification technology from companies worldwide is incredible, as more companies place a greater emphasis on employee development. The gamification industry had a US $9.1 billion market size in 2020 and is expected to grow at an average rate of 27.4% per year until 2025.
Here are some reasons why companies worldwide are choosing to invest in gamification and incorporating them into their training and development programs:
Encourages Ongoing Development
One of the best ways to build agent engagement is to offer continuous training and development, showing that growth and promotion are always on the horizon. Performance tends to drop when people feel that they are in a rut and not developing further.
Investing in gamification enables agents to undergo a more engaging form of training, encouraging them to develop further through their professional careers. 74% of employees believe a lack of continuous training is their most significant hurdle to reaching their full potential, demonstrating the void that gamification can help fill.
Agents that have been with you for a longer time possess a significant amount of knowledge and are more critical in the future development of your contact centre. For this reason, developing a continuous, concise and engaging training plan across an agent’s career lifespan is just as important as their initial training. An investment into gamification for ongoing training is a direct investment to growing the depth of knowledge in your contact centre.
Builds Engagement
Because certain aspects of the contact centre industry can become quite numbers-driven and repetitive, managers cannot understate the value in building agent engagement through alternative means such as gamification and non-work-related activities.
Gamification presents a whole new world of engagement. 83% of employees who undergo gamified training are more motivated at work, bringing instant improvement to several baseline KPIs. Humans naturally tend to respond higher to visual movements rather than static reading or listening to an audio presentation, and it’s this behavioural pattern that gamification appeals to, and how engagement is built.
Offers A Change of Pace
Incorporating gamification into your contact centre as part of a continuous development plan allows the pace of an agent’s work to vary. Because functions within the contact centre industry are very time focused and micromanaged, agents are more susceptible to burnout. Altering pace and tasks for agents is another means to building employee engagement.
Variation is all that’s commonly needed to build engagement. It might be taking an unexpected day off, a surprise work lunch or some other means of changing up the work cycle. While all of these tasks to build engagement are cards a manager can play, they all deviate from getting work done. Gamification alternatively allows for variation in workplace activities whilst remaining on task and providing some direct benefit to the contact centre. A survey by TalentLMS shows that 49% of employees tend to get bored with non-gamification training, illustrating that rote learning can be counter-intuitive due to its low engagement.
Better Training Results
Gamification based training appeals to a large base of learning styles and makes for higher engagement due to requiring input from the user. It’s this interactive mode of engagement in gamification that allows agents to receive, digest, and store more information than by other training methods.
Gamification has been highly effective at teaching and assisting agents at storing information, so much so that participants who use gamification as part of their training score on average 14% higher in skill-based assessments than those who don’t.
Demonstrates A Commitment to Your Employees
A significant factor in building employee engagement comes from the earnt respect of senior management. By managers showing they care about their agents, agents are more likely to reciprocate this level of care and feel more motivated in the workplace. This symbiotic relationship is what helps drive the achievement of KPIs and enhances employee engagement.
As most agents are looking for progression and development, an investment in gamification demonstrates a commitment to agent development, resulting in stronger performance and increased engagement. Agents value continuous training and engagement from their managers so much that in a survey, 94% of employees admitted they would stay at a company longer if they had invested in their professional development.
Building engagement as a contact centre manager is no easy feat, especially when external turbulence can impact an agent’s work performance. Whilst there are many tactics available to managers to build engagement and stimulate agents, no other solution keeps them on task and as engaged as gamification. Should you seek to develop engagement within your contact centre using gamification, speak to one of our expert consultants today.
The Needs to Know About Contact Centre Automation
The quality of service and efficiency of how a contact centre is run directly impacts its ability to be successful. Technology is always advancing so to remain competitive it is important for every organisation to regularly review the systems and processes in place to see how these can be improved.
The Genesis of Automation and IVR
Attempts to automate phone-based customer interactions have been around for decades. First-generation IVR (interactive voice response) systems were one of the first systems to automatically interact with a customer through voice recognition and/or keypad inputs. The IVR’s primary role is to automate some of the simpler tasks such as providing account details, transferring funds, or paying a bill. This type of automation allows agents to make better use of their time.
The advent of web interfaces, such as queries through chatbots or social media, means the focus is now on the entire business’ omnichannel experience. Tremendous advancements fuel today’s generation of contact centre automation in AI-powered natural language processing, sophisticated voice bots and intelligent machine learning. This has shown that humans and virtual agents can operate as co-workers helping to make the agents’ job more interesting.
How Automation Of The Contact Centre Works:
Automation within a contact centre can increase efficiency at the front-end and back-end, allowing managers and agents to make more informed decisions. Modern technology can respond to situations faster than most human counterparts, providing a competitive edge when achieving KPIs. While modern technology demonstrates impressive computing speed, its ability to solve complicated customer queries is currently limited.
Modern-day AI makes decisions and outputs based on the analysis of previous events, then makes a consolidated prediction for future outcomes. Whilst this technology has shown remarkable results at improving agent efficiency and quality of customer service, the technology displays a lacking ability to handle complicated queries or account for future events that the system has no existing experience in dealing with.
The COVID-19 pandemic placed tremendous strain on contact centres worldwide, forcing tough decisions and the need to adapt to challenging circumstances. Whilst modern-day technology was not able to predict the events of the pandemic were going to take place, it did assist managers and agents through difficult times.
Types of Automation:
Automation is primarily used in the following ways within a contact centre but is not limited to:
Chatbots and Active Listening – Chatbots are becoming one of the fastest adopted technologies in the world. This trend extends far out of the world of contact centres, with many business websites adopting chatbots of their own. Active listening is an important part of the automation process for IVR systems. Natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) provides inputs into natural language generation (NLG), which delivers intuitive IVR systems and improves other touchpoints with the customer service model. IVRs can now process basic requests faster than ever while mimicking a human experience and maintaining the same level of quality. This AI technology has allowed the contact centre industry to maintain a high standard of customer service whilst also achieving higher levels of efficiency.
Robotic process automation (RPA) – This functionality automates common, reproducible agent tasks in the contact centre. RPA can be used to prompt agents to read specific verbiage or help drive call handling efficiency. Whether your agents need assistance ensuring compliance or auto-populating data from one system to another, RPA can help boost agent engagement and customer satisfaction.
Intelligent Automation – A great way to provide your staff with the help and assistance they need to provide the best service they can to your customers. This functionality can make the most out of idle time by sending activities directly to agent desktops. It integrates with your ACD and WFM tool to monitor contact centre metrics and uses this information to determine when to deliver training during the most optimal time. Using predetermined business rules, this type of automation solution prompts agents to work on their prioritised list of tasks. Examples include: 1:1 coaching, personalised training, time to read company updates or responding to emails.
Improving The Customer Experience:
Modern-day automation analyses customer interactions, agent behaviours, contact volumes and hundreds of other variables to deliver a concise contact centre operation plan to help achieve key KPIs. Points of automation such as an IVR, process and intelligent automation have enabled companies to improve their customer service, reduce shrinkage and increase agent engagement regardless of turbulence in the external environment.
The Future Of Contact Centre Automation:
Consumer demand is expected to increase dramatically; Deloitte predicts retail spending growth will reach 5.9% for 2020-21, leading to an overall increase in demand for customer service. Growth within the Australian workforce size doesn’t compare to the growth in consumer spending, meaning the contact centre industry is now expected to make more from less. Automation, through its various forms, will help greatly by removing the need for agents to do many of the simple, repetitive tasks they do today and ensuring they get the coaching and 1on1 time they need.
If you would like to find out more about automation speak to one of our friendly consultants today.