When Call Centers Become Contact Centers - the Impact on Workforce Management

While the “call center” designation is likely to stick around for a while, agent interaction via telephone is now just one component of customer communication. Today, the public may reach out via email, online chat or social media. All of these additional channels are ultimately beneficial, but many call centers are just beginning to grasp the impact they will have - from a customer engagement perspective, but also from a workforce management perspective.

Email/Live Chat
Written exchanges of information, whether via email or text chat, have become commonplace. However, these channels work best with simple questions and conflict resolutions where a few sentences from both participants will suffice. Once the point has been reached where the number of exchanged messages tops 5-10, it might be advisable to switch to a telephone conversation.

With online chat, it may take longer to complete a customer interaction, simply because it takes longer to type a message than to say it. However, online chat agents can manage up to five sessions simultaneously, which will impact productivity and scheduling. If five proves too many (measure response times to each customer to determine this), three ongoing sessions might be a more practical limit.

When it comes to workforce management scheduling, you will want chat agents with proven written skills. While the Internet has done no shortage of damage to the disciplines of spelling, grammar and punctuation, it is vital that any written communication from your company to customers is free of such errors.

Social Media
A Facebook page and a Twitter account are great ways for companies to announce new products and specials and exchange ideas with customers. They are less effective for such traditional call center functions as handling orders and returns or resolving disputes. However, this too is changing rapidly.

If the call center is to take the lead on establishing and maintaining a company’s social media presence, adequate resources must be made available to do so, to make certain pages are updated, questions are answered, and ongoing communications are having a positive impact on branding and customer loyalty.

That starts with creating and scheduling a social media team based on experience and training. Agents should not just be familiar with these outlets, but be well versed on the company’s social media strategy and best practices.

And, as with email and online chat, choose agents and experts with written communication skills, and when a problem arises try to route that customer back to a call-in situation where it might be easier to resolve the situation verbally.

Each of these new communication channels should get included into your overall forecasting, scheduling and staffing planning process.

What is Cloud Computing?

Everybody talks about cloud computing, but do you really know what it is, how it works, if it might be something for your business and how it could benefit your call center. There is a great video on YouTube that explains What is Cloud Computing - posted by Salesforce.com. Obviously, this video focuses on CRM, however, the principles are the same for call center software such as workforce management and scheduling.

Call Center in the Cloud: Is it cheaper and simpler?

In a recent article in InformationWeek "Call Center in the Cloud: Cheaper and Simpler" there are some interesting customer case studies, interviews and research that summarize the key benefits of cloud computing in the call center. Some highlights from the article:

• Call centers convert on-premise IT systems to cloud-based systems for flexibility, scalability, ease-of-use and substantially lower cost.
• They need to scale up and down and want to unify service across multiple sites
• Besides relieving contact center operators of IT maintenance, they also avoid the capital expense of IT hardware
• Cloud-based call centers can save large enterprises as much as 50% compared to on-premise systems

The article also contains some research by Frost & Sullivan. Please click here to get to the article.

Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine’s 2010 Product of the Year Award for Workforce Management Solution

We are very excited that Monet WFM Live has been recognized as Product of the Year for exceptional innovation by TMC’s Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine. Here is a short statement from the announcement. “Monet Software received a 2010 Product of the Year Award for its achievement in advancing contact center technologies. Monet WFM Live has demonstrated excellence as well as provided ROI for the companies that use it,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “Customer Interaction Solutions magazine has been honoring innovative companies for 13 years and Monet Software has earned its place with this distinguished honor.”

We very much appreciate this award and would like to thank our customers and Customer Interaction Solution Magazine for this honor. The 13th Annual Product of the Year Award winners are featured in the January 2011 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

New year's resolutions for call center managers

Happy New Year! At the beginning of a new year, as new plans and strategies get implemented, it might be a good idea to step back and think about your "new year's resolutions" for your call center. Think about some key questions you should ask yourself and your team to help you improve the operation of your call center in 2011. Here are a few questions to consider:

• What were the key challenges in 2010 and how can we overcome them?
• What do we need to do to keep our agents happy and motivated?
• How can we better serve your customer?
• How to maintain or improve your service levels?
• How can we better leverage new web-based technologies and solutions to make our work easier and more efficient?
  
• What online sources are available that provide me with new tips, ideas and tools (blog, twitter, etc.) for my daily work?
  
• What are the top 3 things I should focus on in 2011?

Call center metrics - what's important?

There are many call center metrics you can track, so the key question is often: What is really important for my call center? We have compiled a list of call center metrics that are usually used to measure performance. But before you select the metrics, you should first establish the overall goals and objectives for your specific business and call center operations. There are a couple of strategic goals and objectives that might apply to your call center:

• Contribute to profitability of your business
• Deliver services at lowest possible costs
  
• Maximize revenues
  
• Continuously improve customer experience and satisfaction
  
• Optimize the management of your workforce

Often, it is a combination of several goals, but it is important to rank those based on importance for your business. In the next blog posting, we will list 10 key metrics that you you might use to measure performance based on your prioritization - please stay tuned.

Call center workforce management software in the cloud

In case you have missed our "cloud-based WFM" webinar, we have posted a short version as a video "Advantages of call center workforce management in the cloud" on YouTube. Learn about the key advantages of a cloud-based workforce management solution for call centers and how it compares to traditional, on-premise workforce management software.

Real-time schedule adherence in call centers

If you were to poll a number of contact center managers about their biggest challenges, chances are good that agent adherence will show up near the top of their lists. It’s impossible to overstate how critical adherence is in a contact center. A contact center may have the best schedule in the world, but it’s not going to do a lot of good if agents are always out of adherence and, as a result, service levels begin to slide.

Real-time adherence monitoring, accompanied by customized reporting, will tell you WHY you are out of adherence. It might be certain agents or certain work groups, or it may not be agents’ fault at all: a poorly designed schedule might be the cause of low service levels. It may be a certain time of day that causes the most trouble spots, which narrows down your list of probable causes.

Also, it’s important that agents understand what their adherence goals are. A contact center is a sum of many moving parts, and agents need to realize that taking 10 minutes to check their social networking page may not seem like much, but put together in aggregate among all agents, 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there can throw the entire contact center far off the mark for service levels. Real-time adherence monitoring can help agents better understand how their behavior can directly affect service-level goals, and help them feel like contributors to the success of the contact center.

If you are interested in this topic, please make sure to read this whitepaper "Strategies for Improving Schedule Adherence".

Misconceptions about hosted call center solutions

A recent paper by the research firm DMG Consulting discusses five top misconceptions about hosted call center solutions. We would like to add to this from the “cloud computing” perspective. So, here are the misconceptions and our comments:

It's only for small contact centers: Actually, with the cloud based approach it is easy to scale and address the needs of larger centers and/or larger organizations. The required computing power can easily grow (and shrink) based on the customer needs – this is called “elastic computing”. There are many cloud computing companies (e.g. salesforce.com) that successfully provide cloud solutions to very large enterprises.

Limited functionality: Since many cloud based solution are already in the 2nd or 3rd version, they offer very rich functionality. Often, they are easier to use and provide an fast way to add new features through automated upgrades.

Not flexible and customizable: Cloud computing solution were designed with lots of users and different customer needs in mind. Therefore, they have a more flexible architecture and often allow customization and configuration without programming.

Implementations and integrations are more difficult than premise-based initiatives. Cloud based solution have a more flexible architecture and they were designed with “inter-connectivity” in mind, knowing that “island” solutions won’t be successful.

Hosting has a higher total cost of ownership than premise-based solutions: If you do a "total cost of ownership" comparison, the cloud based solutions have a clear advantage. In addition to avoiding the overall investment risk of a large upfront capital expenditure, there are costs that are often hidden, sich as: upgrades, hardware, ongoing operation, additional software (database, etc.), backup solutions, and IT staffing.

How to select a Workforce Management Solution that fits your needs

We have compiled a list of questions that should be helpful when selecting a workforce management solution for a small to medium sized call center:

Performance and key capabilities

• Does it accurately forecast call volumes by leveraging data from your ACD system?
• Can you easily run “what-if” scenarios based on shift patterns, skill levels, exceptions, etc.?
• Can you make intra-day changes to forecast and schedule based on changing call volumes?
• Can you track and monitor agent adherence?
• Can you create performance management reports?

Time and resources to implement

• How long does it take to implement the solution from start to finish?
• How is it deployed? Do I need to buy and implement hardware or can I just use it over the web?
• What resources (money, people, etc.) do I need to implement the solution?

Total cost of using the solution

• Upfront costs: What are the total upfront costs for software, hardware, integration and implementation?
• Ongoing costs: What are the ongoing costs such as subscription, maintenance, support, upgrade fees?
• Hidden costs: Are there any “hidden” costs you should account for? (IT resources, integration costs, licenses, upgrade costs, etc.)

Usability

• Is the solution easy and intuitive for non-IT people to use?
• Does the solution focus on your specific call center needs?
• What features do you really need?

ROI and financial risk

• How much is the upfront investments? The higher, the lower the immediate ROI.
• How long does it take until I can start using the solution to realize the benefits?
• What is the financial risk if the solution doesn’t meet your needs? How much does it cost you to "return" it?
  

Advantages of cloud-based workforce management software

We often get asked about the difference between cloud-based, web-based, hosted and SaaS-based workforce management software and how it compares to the on-premise software model. In order to provide some guidance on this, we decided to offer a webinar about this topic: The 5 Advantages of Cloud-based Workforce Management Software. If you are interested in more details or have any questions please let us know or register for the webinar, which will be held on Wednesday, March 17 at 9 a.m. PST.

Welcome to the Call Center Workforce Management blog

Welcome to our new blog about Call Center Workforce Management. We at Monet Software are dedicated to making workforce management, forecasting and scheduling easier and more efficient for call centers. With our new blog, we would like to share ideas, tips, insights, best practices, industry and technology trends with you. We hope that this blog proves to be useful for call center executives, managers and supervisors in their daily work.

The Monet Software team