The Great Customer Experience Imperative Drives Demand for Workforce Optimization (WFO) Services

As competition and commoditization increase, organizations need to do more to earn the trust and loyalty of customers.

Many forward-thinking businesses are attacking this opportunity by creating differentiation with great customer service. They are using new and improved technologies to resolve customer queries fast, anticipate needs, and be available wherever and whenever customers need them. Experience is a big hot button today. Build a better customer experience than your competitors, and you can earn client trust that fends off competition, builds corporate resilience, and grows revenue.

Great customer experiences are orchestrated with powerful technology and processes. They don’t happen by accident.

The Customer Experience Alphabet Soup QM (quality management), WFM (workforce management), WEM (workforce engagement management), and WFO (workforce optimization) are among the many acronyms for popular tools and services that businesses use to orchestrate CX (customer experience). Definitions vary by vendor and consumer (it can be confusing at times), but they all strive to help users increase efficiency, productivity and gain the benefits of collecting interaction data. Among the latest CX-related technology innovations, businesses right now are asking the most about workforce optimization including quality management, sentiment/speech analytics, and schedule adherence.

Click to watch this brief video for a WFO overview.

Let’s take a closer look at very popular WFO elements:

Quality Management (QM) QM (video definition) isn’t new. Managers have always coached contact center agents to drive better performance. QM tools, though, are getting more powerful and automated. Every professional sports team has video analysts who study film to spot tendencies, identify weaknesses and opportunities. The latest QM technologies help you do the same by:

  • Elevating management’s ability to train agents at scale including support for underperformers and showcasing the work of star performers.
  • Providing agents easy access to the right information to help them react and respond quickly to customers reducing time-to-resolution rates and increasing the volume of calls an agent can support in a given time period.
  • Enhancing employee and management experience with intuitive interfaces offering simple, productive workflows and comprehensive dashboards that make data-driven coaching and quality reporting a breeze.

Workforce Management As a former end-user, Andressa Marlan describes WFM as “having the right people in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time.” Workforce management helps businesses to plan and schedule people to help customers when they need them, using chat, voice, email or a blended environment of all of the above and knowing if that is 5 people or 500 to do so.

A key component of WFM is adherence, which drives real-time insights across your business to see if agents are working when they are supposed to be working and help managers ensure employees are following their optimized schedules. 8x8 partners with Verint to provide a seamless WFM integration that ties together 8x8’s contact center solutions and WFM into a full WFO suite to meet your contact center needs. For a deeper understanding about WFM and how adherence is a pillar of WFM, check out this brief, on-demand Webinar with 8x8 and Verint.

Great customer experiences are orchestrated with powerful technology and processes. They don’t happen by accident.

Speech and Customer Experience Analytics

Speech analytics technologies are used to measure and monitor customer experience. Organizations use this information in a variety of ways including to predict and prevent churn and identify prevalent buying triggers.

What is the magic? Capturing and recording customer interactions be it phone, chat, or on a social channel such as Twitter or Facebook. This holistic vantage point can give managers visibility into every customer interaction.

Speech analytics transcribes speech-to-text then analyzes it to identify sentiment, clarity of voice, overtalk, and other words and phrases that provide insights into a customer’s mindset and potential behavior. Chat interactions can also provide those same phrases and insights to trends within the same solution. If you are a tech guru who likes to understand speech analytics’ technical details, you can watch this demonstration.

Customer experience analytics is another category of analytic services that enable contact center managers to analyze customer service trends and explore the details of every interaction to gain actionable insight into the full customer journey as well as post-call survey results. Advanced search of all interactions serves to highlight instances where targeted metrics are not met. And IVR path analytics show the dominant paths customers are selecting. Watch this video below to learn more.

What is 8x8 platform? All of the products and services mentioned in this article have been focused on the contact center. But what if you could extend them to office communications to include employees who do not work in the contact center? You could then map a customer’s journey across an entire organization by capturing analytics from all departments.

You could give office receptionists contact center-like capabilities for routing or CRM purposes. You could more easily give contact center agents collaboration tools to identify resources that can help them answer a customer’s question faster.

This is where the industry is headed recognizing that the lines between the contact center and office communications are evaporating. When you think about it, every employee plays a role in helping customers have great experiences in some form. Having UCaaS and CCaaS (as well as CPaaS) integrated on a single cloud platform unleashes benefits throughout an organization.

Click below for 8x8 platform.

While combining telecommunications services for contact center agents and office employees isn’t a totally new concept, cloud, networking and software innovations have transformed what is possible with it. Approximately 135 years ago, you could listen to music or spoken words on a tape recorder or record player. The experience of listening to music today, naturally, is radically different. It is the same with 8x8 platform, and we think, in combination with the alphabet soup services: WFO, WFM, QM, etc., as we have discussed here, will radically change how organizations orchestrate customer experiences to achieve better business results.

Focusing on customer experience is now a business imperative. Uniting all your communications on a single platform combined with value-added integrations and services is the best path forward.

Solve for X: Communications Choices for Employee Experience and Customer Experience Optimization: a Webinar for IT professionals who want to learn about the benefits of using an integrated unified communications and contact center platform approach.

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