Contact centers and their frontline teams benefit enormously from today’s highly advanced workforce management (WFM) technologies. With access to improved processes, support for hybrid working models and more autonomy over their schedules and work-life balance, research shows that agents are now happier, more empowered and more motivated.
Improvements in agent engagement reflect a broader change in the perception of contact center work overall. Once regarded as a low-skill, high-turnover job with limited career prospects, today, the contact center agent role is seen as a professional, customer-focused career with real opportunities for growth, development and meaningful impact.
We know that WFM technologies have been essential in driving this shift. So, what lessons can other teams take from this success story, and where else can WFM be successfully applied?
One key application of WFM technologies is in supporting the mission-critical back office function, which closely integrates with the contact center frontline and is crucial in delivering seamless customer experiences. Learn more about the capabilities — and the enormous potential — of back office WFM solutions in our guide below.
How today’s technology can transform back office workforce management
The same solutions that have revolutionized the experience of frontline contact center agents can deliver a wide range of potential benefits in support of back office workforce management, including:
- Increased efficiency: By automating scheduling, task prioritization, and performance monitoring, WFM systems reduce labor-intensive manual processes, streamline workflows, and improve productivity. Management staff are freed from error-prone tasks such as updating and manipulating spreadsheets for rosters, holidays, and performance analysis. Instead, they can focus on value-add tasks, such as improving processes that enhance the customer experience.
- Transformed forecast accuracy: Contact center WFM tools excel at gathering and analyzing vast tracts of historical data to identify trends and forecast workloads accurately. Applying similar analysis to back office operations enables better anticipation and planning for variations in demand, as well as more efficient task distribution. Especially important for seasonal peaks and troughs, improved forecasting accuracy ensures the availability of relevant administrative resources and infrastructure support, including IT help.
- Effective resource allocation:A WFM solution for back office teams can align staffing levels with workloads, in the same way as it does inside the contact center. It can ensure the right people are in place at the right time, minimizing the likelihood of backlogs and reducing idle time. By optimizing schedules, WFM will highlight any potential gaps that may not be immediately apparent to managers, averting problems further along the line.
- Real-time visibility: Back office WFM solutions with built-in desktop analytics provide an added advantage by showing in real-time what staff are working on and whether they are using company-approved or unapproved web applications. This information helps managers priorities tasking during shifts and identifies less productive or passive time spent on digital channels. It gives visibility of schedule adherence, enables better resource allocation, and highlights inefficient processes, as well as where further training could be required. Having timely data-driven insights means WFM strategies can be refined to improve back office performance, which in turn helps contact center agents deliver a higher standard of customer service.
- Consistent service levels: By streamlining task management, prioritizing critical issues to meet deadlines and improving performance, WFM tools help to maintain a reliable level and quality of service across different departments. Additionally, the real-time assessment of backlogs allows work to be routed to the most capable staff available. Marrying up the most suitable person to the job in hand reduces stress levels by not overburdening less experienced staff, and reduces bottlenecks, helping to achieve better and faster outcomes. Automated quality assurance can also provide valuable feedback to individuals about their performance.
- Data-driven decision making: Eliminating data-related bias or misinterpretation is another benefit of WFM that is equally useful in back office departments. While it can be tempting to stick to habitual working practices, the assimilation of comprehensive, accurate figures and statistics enables decisions to be made on data, not hunches. It also provides insights into employee performance, task completion rates and workload patterns, allowing managers to make informed decisions on staffing requirements, absence management, training needs and process improvement.
- Compliance and accountability support: WFM monitoring and tracking capabilities help back offices adhere to SLAs and internal policies, with clear accountabilities for task completion. Automatic encryption of customer data while in use, in transit and storage supports a range of regulatory obligations covering privacy and security, such as PCI, GDPR, HIPAA, MiFID and CCPA. This is vital for maintaining compliance standards throughout an organization.
- Cross-team synergies: Using the same WFM platform for front and back office operations leverages synergies, enabling easier and better collaboration, data sharing, and overall workforce optimization. Standardized reporting across functions gives a comprehensive view of what’s working and where attention is needed and can uncover hidden sales opportunities that would benefit from further investment.
- Improved employee engagement: Back office personnel, like their frontline counterparts, benefit from self-service scheduling tools for managing their shifts and time off requests to fit. This type of flexible scheduling promotes employee wellbeing, helping staff to determine their work-life balance without impacting the contact center’s service levels. A degree of self-regulation additionally enables staff to cover gaps by swapping shifts or lunch breaks with colleagues without management intervention but customized to the organization’s own specific rules and roles.
- Cost reduction: By eliminating overstaffing and reducing unnecessary overtime, WFM tools help back offices operate more cost-effectively. Consistent monitoring ensures productivity or service quality isn’t affected. Also, reliable forecasting allows more confidence in forward planning so budgets and resources can be managed prudently, taking advantage of longer lead times to negotiate better vendor pricing.
See back office WFM for yourself
The great news is these benefits are very easy to demonstrate – find out more about how Calabrio Workforce Engagement and Management solutions can help transform the back office by booking a demonstration here.
