Workforce Engagement Management (WEM)

An organization can drive significant market change by acknowledging, focusing on, and creating awareness about their employees’ roles in customer engagement. Often called the next generation of workforce optimization (WFO), workforce engagement management (WEM) provides agents with the tools to enhance and sustain great customer service.

Customer experience is the most strategic and critical indicator of performance. That's why organizations must look toward balancing employee and customer satisfaction with their business strategy - it's what guarantees excellent customer experiences.

WEM is necessary for modern businesses that want effective quality management for both customer and agent satisfaction. Read on to learn about WEM, how it benefits enterprises, its essential elements, and leading solutions in this space.

What is workforce engagement management?

Benefits of workforce engagement management

How workforce engagement management in contact centers affects the overall performance

Important elements of workforce engagement management

Leading contact center WFM solutions for enterprises

8x8 Contact Center: Boost workforce employee engagement with 8x8

What is workforce engagement management?

Workforce engagement management is a collection of software products designed to help an enterprise manage and enhance employee experience and engagement. WEM functions support agent recruitment and onboarding, evaluation and improvement, training, time management, motivation, performance management, and analytics. They can provide greater insight into the customer's issues, employees' performance, and the company's workflows.

Areas that WEM covers include call recording, text analytics, speech analytics, workforce management, gamification, etc. Commonly, it is known as an evolved form of workforce optimization that focuses on managing labor costs and enhancing productivity.

Benefits of workforce engagement management

WEM software can benefit contact and call centers in a variety of ways. Some ways managing workforce engagement can positively impact operations and agent experience have been listed below:

1. Cost-effectiveness Workforce management software come as part of contact center solutions. It's designed to manage staffing levels and labor costs. When used effectively in the context of workforce engagement, it has the potential to ensure contact centers are staffed appropriately at different periods, ensuring they stay within budget goals.
2. Customer satisfaction When an organization has engaged contact center agents at the forefront and when your staff is vested in continuous improvement, clients are bound to notice the difference. Engaged representatives are more likely to deliver better customer experiences, which is reflected in customer surveys with high satisfaction and recommendation scores.
3. Quality scores Contact and call centers usually have quality score goals as part of the (QM) quality management process. WEM software helps an enterprise streamline the quality management process, ensure consistency, and make agent training easier in order to meet these targets.
4. Agent engagement and retention Workforce engagement management can include effective scheduling and detailed feedback, as well as empowering agents to own their employee performance results. This leads to lower churn rates, making retention goals reachable.
5. Abandon rates and queue times As previously mentioned, workforce management software helps avoid understaffing and overstaffing, ensuring efficient operations . Understaffing can cause greater queue times which leads to higher abandon rates. With software that promotes optimal staffing, time on queue and abandonment rate targets can be met easily.

Important elements of workforce engagement management

• Recruitment and onboarding Recruitment and onboarding with WEM software can set the standard for employee engagement with clear expectations, comprehensive training, and the chance to request clarification. This way, the staff can also quickly become familiar with the tools and processes of the contact center.
• Evaluation & improvement Managers and agents must be trained to recognize the most important metrics for overall performance and what represents a good or bad score. A WEM solution with centralized analytics can showcase which member has excellent scores on all fronts as well as who is struggling. It can also recommend clear protocols for improvement.
• Time management You can count on WEM for intraday management, contact center forecasting, and scheduling. This helps companies prepare for unexpected call volumes and changes in staff availability. Auto-attendant and IVR are features that can also help agents effectively manage their time and assist them in busy periods.
• Performance management When an agent needs coaching or a manager spots a recurring issue, they must have convenient access to smart training tools. With gamification, call recording, assessment quizzes, and courses, employees have different options for professional coaching, review, and even growth. This enhances employee engagement throughout the employment lifecycle.
• Task management Managers can create workflows that map out tasks fairly and help all employees understand their roles easily. With agent-assistance tools as well as shift-bidding and schedule-swapping, employees can feel more empowered in their role and tweak their own workload in real time.

How workforce engagement management in contact centers affects the overall performance

• Excellent customer experience and loyalty With WEM software, companies of all sizes can achieve effective scheduling, training, and forecasting - contributing to long-term customer satisfaction. Customers won't have to wait long on hold or be passed around to multiple agents since the right software and smart routing tools can ensure calls are routed to the most appropriate resource for their needs. The software can also help decrease the abandoned call rate, as the prompt resolutions lead callers to believe that the business genuinely cares about their needs. This can lead to more recommendations through word of mouth and better customer reviews.
• Improved customer lifetime value A great experience with your agent can turn a client into a lifelong customer, which should not be underestimated. Besides, acquiring a new customer can be almost six to seven times more expensive than retaining an existing one. The customer lifetime value indicates the total revenue generated by a client over their entire customer journey. Therefore, encouraging a customer to stick around can improve your business’s bottom line.
• Optimized contact center budget Similar to all other automation tools, WEM software streamlines your workflows and provides more accurate forecasting and scheduling recommendations. This gives you the information you need to optimally staff your contact center at various times. You also won't be stuck paying employees when there's no work to be done nor would you be scrambling to call in agents at the last minute due to a sudden surge. This ensures lower staff turnover rates, which means less time spent recruiting and onboarding new hires.
• Improved agent retention Agents have a tough job, what with regularly dealing with high call volumes and angry customers looking for quick problem resolution. With WEM, the workload can be considerably less stressful due to lower customer complaints, robust training, access to customer information with CRM integrations, and better staffing. The opportunity for career growth and feedback can improve the likelihood of agent retention and decrease the risk of turnover.

Leading contact center WFM solutions for enterprises

Workforce management solutions are stage one tools for managing agent engagement. Exploring options for this is the first step towards building great experiences for both customers and employees.

1. 8x8 Contact Center 8x8 Contact Center is the perfect choice for organizations who want a fully scalable cloud communications solution with WFM features. It ticks all the boxes for end-to-end CX and is suitable for various types of enterprises since it allows custom setup for all departments according to their needs. The call routing and data reporting capabilities are some of the best features that 8x8 offers, while the training and service improvement features encourage employee engagement.
2. Five9 Five9 offers a WFM tool that is easy to implement and allows robust reporting for all levels of management. The reporting feature covers call metrics, staff adherence, schedules for direct reports, PTO requests, and many other reporting options. Operational hours, source data, and various templates for schedules and people can also be configured within the WFM tool. However, some of Five9's products have been reported to be dated and lack basic features that others consider industry standard.
3. Genesys Genesys Cloud focuses on improving how enterprises service customers and offer configuration for various components without external help. The workload management feature reduces the time spent processing requests and can add work variation for agents. Although Genesys offers great features, its WFM implementation is said to be clunkier than other solutions.
4. Alvaria Workforce Alvaria can empower businesses to deploy large-scale enterprise-hosted workforce management platforms. With smart project management tools and responsive support, it is an excellent solution for various companies. Alvaria WEM can accommodate complex routing structures, making reporting and data access easy through the platform.

8x8 Contact Center: Boost workforce employee engagement with 8x8

Want excellent customer experience across all channels? Choose 8x8 Contact Center with its fantastic workforce engagement and adaptive quality management solutions. With 8x8, enterprises spend less time on analysis and more time coaching teams to connect with people. Quick customer feedback can help improve agent performance, while forecasting can minimize the overall operational effort.