Workforce optimisation

Getting the most out of your contact centre means putting a focus on workforce optimisation.

Your contact centre agents and supervisors have direct interactions with your customers every day, and are very much the day-to-day face and voice of your brand.

So, how can you support them to do their jobs to the best of their abilities?

That’s where workforce optimisation comes in.

What is WFO (workforce optimisation)?

WFO is a big-picture strategy that encompasses several tactical approaches to improving efficiency and productivity in a contact centre. These include—but are not limited to—quality management, workforce management (WFM), analytics, and workflow integration.

The primary goal of WFO is to get all your people, processes, and technology working together in perfect harmony to create the best customer experience possible.

Workforce engagement management (WEM) is a related concept, but even though you sometimes hear it mentioned alongside WFO, they’re not quite the same thing.

WEM puts more of an emphasis on the employee experience as a key driver of productivity and efficiency. Ultimately, both are important ideas when it comes to workplace optimisation, so we’ll explore both of them here.

Why does it matter? The key benefits of WFO

There are a great many software solutions out there aimed at helping businesses with WFO. But why? What is it about workforce optimisation that makes it a crucial part of so many organisations’ contact centre strategy?

Here are some of the major benefits of WFO:

Higher productivity

Greater productivity is one of the main objectives for WFO, so it’s not surprising that it tops this list. The great thing about implementing WFO strategies well is that you’ll see productivity boosts coming from multiple directions.

For instance, suppose you employ fixed order call assignment in your contact centre—in other words, any call coming in will be routed to the next available agent. Your WFO analytics platform may reveal that first-call resolution rates are lagging because customers aren’t connecting with the right agents. So, you might decide to try skills-based call routing instead so your customers can always reach someone who can resolve their issue the first time around.

When you support your WFO efforts with the best software solutions, you’ll often find even more opportunities to improve productivity.

With the Dialpad Ai +Playvox integration, for example, you can optimise scheduling and staffing based on accurate forecasting for maximum productivity.

Lower costs

WFO benefits your bottom line in other ways too.

One of the key principles of WFO is workforce management, which helps you save money by avoiding under- or overstaffing. When you have a precise knowledge of how many employees you’ll need to cover a specific shift, you won’t be short-staffed or experience large amounts of idle time.

Improved customer experience

If you have a wealth of customer data, that can also be leveraged using WFO to help you achieve a better and more efficient customer journey.

One way of implementing this is to put a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme in place. This is a strategic approach to analysing and acting on direct feedback from customers, and can inform your workforce optimisation tactics.

The goal is to streamline your response to feedback so none of it goes to waste. (And, when you take comments on board and respond quickly, you demonstrate to your customers that you value their input, which encourages them to continue providing more feedback in the future.)

Workforce optimisation examples: What does WFO entail?

WFO might sound like a good idea in theory, but what exactly does it involve? Here are some of the core areas that contribute to workforce optimisation:

Employee scheduling and shift management

Achieving efficient workforce management takes a lot of planning. For one thing, not all of your contact centre staff will have identical skill sets. This means you may need to schedule rotas so you have all knowledge bases covered continuously.

Another point to bear in mind is that it’s all too easy to rely on standard schedules, but working some flexibility into the plan leads to better outcomes in the long run. That’s because this helps accommodate the unexpected, ultimately improving your employees’ work-life balance and boosting engagement.

Forecasting and workforce planning

Of course, you can’t create effective schedules without being able to forecast your staffing needs accurately. That begins with tracking your contact centre’s work volumes in real-time to give you a basis for your forecasts. Some tools, such as Dialpad Support, have WFM features that can do this for you:

When you do this, you may find unexpected patterns emerging. While some surges might be easy to predict—such as just after a new product launch, for instance—you may identify others that are more surprising.

This will enable you to fine-tune your schedule and ensure you have adequate support in place during busy periods. These digital solutions are particularly useful if your workplace embraces hybrid and remote working, as your schedulers will be able to build schedules, ask agents about availability, and communicate with the team about staffing more easily.

Performance management

Another crucial aspect of workplace optimisation is performance management. This encompasses a variety of elements including:

• Target setting. Rather than creating identical performance targets for all agents, personalise these. After all, it doesn’t make sense to give a new hire the same target as an agent who has five years of experience. To get the most out of each staff member, it’s vital to set goals that are challenging, but achievable.

• Appraisal and analysis. Using WFO tools to track performance is key. Monitoring your agents’ progress in real-time allows you to develop an in-depth understanding of how to help your team improve and deliver high-quality support consistently.

• Feedback and positive reinforcement. It’s not always possible to be entirely positive when giving employees feedback about their performance. But you mustn’t simply focus on the negatives without recognising achievements. This is another crucial part of building employee engagement as a driver of workplace optimisation.

Training, development, and upskilling

Is there more you could be doing on the training side? It’s worth reviewing your training modules and documentation regularly.

A truly unified vision for training will help your new hires ramp up their potential and start delivering top-tier customer service as quickly as possible. If you have a small team, this could mean personalising training programmes to suit each individual’s strengths and weaknesses, and tailoring their training to help fill in the gaps.

But even for large teams, it’s possible to optimise your training. For example, you could use customer service Ai tools to analyse conversations for the most frequently asked questions or trickiest topics that come up in customer calls, and focusing your training on those areas.

Employee engagement initiatives

Workforce engagement management (WEM) is now widely recognised as a critical factor not only in improving staff morale but also in the standard of customer service your employees deliver.

It involves providing all the support your staff need to do their jobs as well as possible. This includes several elements we’ve already discussed here, as well as a few we haven’t, such as:

• Constructive performance feedback

• Personalised training and KPI targets

• Concrete recognition for excellence

• Efficient and flexible scheduling

• Voice of the Employee (VoE) initiatives

• Motivation via gamification

The reasoning behind WEM is straightforward. The more engaged your workforce is, the easier it is to retain employees and increase customer loyalty by providing better service.

Workforce optimisation software: How it can help & how WEM, WFM, and more fit in

Workforce optimisation solutions act as a bridge between the two fields of WFM and WEM, bringing them together.

When you look at a workforce management tool, what you’ll see is a platform that focuses on the nuts and bolts of staffing a contact centre. Typically, this will include features such as:

• Rota scheduling

• Attendance tracking

• Absence management

• Service-level forecasting

What it won’t always do is offer you options for things like real-time analytics or staff training integration. For that, you need a contact centre platform with built-in workforce optimisation features like the Dialpad Support.

On top of the features you’d expect from a WFM solution, you will then have a workforce optimisation tool for a contact centre with:

• Call recording and monitoring

• Real-time agent coaching

• Speech analytics

• Ai live coaching

To take just one of those as an example, Dialpad Support makes it straightforward to implement speech analytics in real-time.

Using the Custom Moments feature, you can design your system settings to pick out important keywords in agent interactions.

You can use this information in multiple ways. For instance, it can help enrich your reporting and contribute to the development of more efficient business strategies, or you can use it to tailor your agent training more effectively.

The increasing focus on WEM as a crucial supplement to WFO analytics means WFO software on its own is no longer the newest kid on the block. That’s why Dialpad has joined forces with WEM experts Playvox.

With the Dialpad + Playvox integration, you can drive employee engagement and boost the customer experience at the same time. You get a unified platform where you can take advantage of:

• Quality management. Continuous performance analysis helps you identify training and coaching needs.

• Team scoring calibration. This ensures a consistent approach to performance evaluation.

• Appeal feature. Employees get involved in their own development and can ask for more information about their rating.

• Recognition. Agents collect points for excellent work, which they can then exchange for rewards.

These WEM features help create an environment where your agents can flourish and are motivated to go the extra mile—all of which is great news for your customers and, ultimately, your business.

Boost employee engagement and customer satisfaction with effective WFO

Customer satisfaction is central to achieving success, and the more engaged your employees are, the more they’ll strive to create a superb customer experience every time.

But to optimise your workforce, you need the right tools. With Dialpad Support and its built-in workforce optimisation features, you get a cutting-edge solution that supports your contact centre team with forecasting, scheduling, and more—all in a single pane of glass.

Workforce optimisation can be a challenge, but with the right software in place, it’s one you can take on and win.