What is Contact Center Workforce Management?
If you've ever been to a call or contact center, you were probably struck by the number of employees. Customer service is still a function that requires a lot of people, and effective centers are very proficient at ensuring they have the right people in the right place at the right time to deliver the best customer experience. Contact center workforce management is the process of forecasting how many agents are needed, based on estimated contact volume, and then hiring, training and scheduling them.
Contact center workforce management teams are always performing a balancing act between over staffing, which is great for wait times but bad for the bottom line, and under staffing, which usually degrades the customer experience. Scheduling is a complex function, especially in contact centers supporting multiple channels. Forecasting and scheduling were once manual tasks performed by spreadsheet wizards. But automation has revolutionized the way contact center workforce management is performed.
Contact center workforce management is an activity that is performed every day. Workforce managers are continuously adjusting staffing plans to account for agent attrition, changes in contact volume, and much more. These events also trigger a need to adjust agent schedules. Workforce management continues to increase in complexity as more channels are introduced and many agents are skilled across various channels. Contact center workforce management software makes forecasting across all these channels less complex, and makes the creation and adjustment of schedules straightforward and easy. And, best of all, no spreadsheets!
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. We provide tools that automate and streamline the contact center workforce management process. 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 Management empowers you to anticipate business demands and optimize your workforce with the industry’s most intelligent and accurate omnichannel forecasting engine. Patented AI and machine learning technology unlocks your workforce’s potential and harnesses the true power of your organization’s greatest asset – your people. The modernized, intuitive interface reduces the training and skillset required to create and manage forecasts and schedules and improves agility with easy intraday capabilities. As a unified component of the CXone platform, CXone WFM is the first of its kind, streamlining and minimizing administration and maintenance and the complexity of managing teams across locations, and helping you ensure that you have the right staffing plan today and into the future.
CXone includes:
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to enhance customer experience and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM) for streamlined contact center workforce planning, quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Analytics – turns insights into results. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI) – leading-edge, intuitive technology that eliminates mundane tasks and speeds resolutions of customer issues for better business outcomes. It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic call center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.
