What is Call Center Workforce Optimization (WFO)
Call center workforce optimization (WFO) is a practice used in call centers of ensuring their employees are appropriately scheduled, trained, monitored, evaluated, rewarded and engaged. The success of call centers is heavily dependent on the quality of their agents and efficient management of labor costs. Therefore, the goal of workforce optimization is to maximize the productivity, quality, and efficiency of a call center's agent team.
Call center workforce optimization is often supported by a collection of software tools that automate many of the components of the optimization process. This includes:
- Workforce Management (WFM) - workforce management software supports a call center's forecasting and scheduling functions, both of which are critical for managing labor costs and delivering a strong customer experience.
- Quality Monitoring (QM) - quality management applications record calls and digital channels, and provide a mechanism to execute and store assessments of the interactions. The best QM solutions also incorporate analytics to increase efficiency and unified agent coaching tools. To increase agent engagement, quality monitoring tools may allow for self-evaluations and agent-accessible reporting.
- Performance Management - performance management systems help develop and engage agents by offering real time and historical dashboards for agents all the way to executives for instant visibility of performance against KPIs. Performance management also commonly includes gamification and social collaboration functionality.
- Recording – Call recording is considered part of workforce optimization because without this functionality quality management can’t exist. Call recording captures the audio from customer interactions. Screen recording captures agent monitors during the interaction, providing insights related to agent process in order to amplify coaching beyond just the content of the conversation.
It's critical to get call center workforce optimization right. With the proper tools, call centers can be well on the way to success.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading call center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world. Our best-in-class tools support effective call center workforce optimization. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its call (or contact) center operations.
NICE CXone Workforce Optimization unlocks your team’s potential by providing tools to inspire employee self-improvement, amplify quality to enhance customer experience, reduce labor waste, and ensure regulatory compliance. Patented technology powers the industry’s most intelligent forecasting, fosters employee ownership and accountability, and gives agents one experience across a cloud platform. As a natively developed suite, CXone WFO unifies workforce management, quality management, performance management and recording to deliver a better experience for agents, supervisors, and customers. With reduced effort and increased flexibility, you can achieve an optimal balance between operational efficiency and a superior customer service.
CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – solutions that empower agents and instill accountability, help achieve service levels at a lower cost, increase contact center efficiency, and revolutionize the customer experience. Essential to contact center workforce optimization efforts, these solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording, and performance management (PM). This is the engine many businesses use for their contact center workforce optimization efforts.
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
CXone provides an intelligent, unified suite of applications covering the breadth of contact center management disciplines, simplifying administration and streamlining the user experience.
