Walk into any call center during a high-volume call period and listen to the reps handling the random calls. It all seems rather chaotic, but there is a pattern that, with the help of computers, breaks down into a predictability that allows managers to:

• accurately forecast, schedule and staff the call center to deal with customer calls
• efficiently record and assess customer satisfaction trends and transactions
• consistently measure employee presence and performance and resulting training needs

Arising from the foregoing is the process of workforce management (WFM) where a strategy emerges that:

• matches your service goals with available staffing and optimum scheduling
• takes immediate advantage of immediate reporting and accumulating historical data and correlates it with goals and performance metrics
• jettisons all those third-party and external reporting approaches that result in vast spreadsheets and cumbersome database analysis in favor of built-in and real-time (as well as actionable) information
• frees analysts and managers of the drudgery of calculating statistics needed in staffing and scheduling forecasts
• introduces users to a friendly, non-technical self-service interface for both on premises and virtual agents
• provides agents with an objective and relentless “performance scorecard” to track and improve their call center performance

The key role of analytics in WFM

The principal advantage of workforce management is its use of analytics. Tom Lockwood and Vicki Herrell’s article in Contact Professional puts it this way:

“Though analytics apply throughout the contact center, they are superbly effective in the management of the workforce…. More to the point, perhaps, analytics offer advantages—such as quick access to relevant information and job-specific dashboards—that have a direct relationship to managing and motivating center staff for maximum efficiency.”

The bottom line: Leveraging your human capital into ROI

The real return on your operation’s biggest cost center — your people — has less to do with the WFM system than how you leverage its analytics into a truly enabling technology. The advantage of going to the cloud is that your system was devised by geniuses for use by non-geniuses. When you place it in the hands of people who are trained how to use and analyze WFM, it could be the key event that turns your call center from a major cost center to the golden doorway of profits and optimum customer experiences.

If you’re looking for cloud call center services that meet the criteria of longevity, reliability and HIPAA privacy compliance, contact us. We’ll get you going without the upfront costs of software and additional servers.