Employee Engagement is Here—Are You Ready to Say “Yes?”

When Gartner creates a new market category, business leaders take notice. And that’s exactly what they did earlier this year for the contact center world.

After recognizing how contact center workforce optimization (WFO) is rapidly expanding into employee engagement, Gartner created a new market category called “workforce engagement management (WEM)” to describe this new focus on the employee.

It makes sense. In today’s world, companies need to:

• deliver a superior, constantly improving customer experience;
• find experienced contact center agents;
• overcome competition that increases daily; and
• retain fickle agents who are pre-disposed to disengage.

On its own, WFO can’t accomplish these goals. The primary focus of WFO is to improve contact center operations by reducing costs, increasing efficiencies, and reducing talk times and after-call work times—goals typically achieved via tools like interaction recording, quality monitoring, workforce management and interaction analytics.

Operational excellence remains an important consideration for today’s contact centers, but other key market factors also demand more focus on the employee. And—since WFO tools aren’t designed to foster employee engagement—this means augmenting WFO with additional, agent-centered WEM offerings.

From WFO to WEM

Companies launching initiatives to increase contact center employee engagement typically target one or more of these goals:

• Decrease agent attrition
• Arm agents with the tools they need to be successful and best serve customers
• Align customers with the specific agents—based upon the agents’ subject matter expertise, personality profile, etc.—best able to quickly and satisfactorily resolve their customer service inquiries
• Add soft benefits, such as agent value, agent flexibility, etc.

And the platforms these companies use to bolster employee engagement usually center around six core areas:

• Recruitment and onboarding
• Evaluation and improvement
• Time management
• Assistance and task management
• Metrics and recognition
• Voice-of-the-Employee (VoE)

After all, finding, training and keeping contact center staff while maintaining a high level of customer service is hard and expensive. It stands to reason that contact center employee engagement done well can massively, positively impact a company’s bottom line. Gartner agrees, predicting that by 2020, employee engagement will be a key differentiator for one out of five contact centers.¹

As a leading provider of contact center technology solutions, Calabrio today offers in our Calabrio ONE platform several capabilities important to supporting WEM goals, including:

• gamification;
• coaching, mentoring and evaluations;
• time and intraday management;
• performance management/metrics and recognition;
• Flexible, dynamic scheduling options;
• Voice-of-the-Employee (VoE); and
• interaction analytics.

Tools such as these are critical, but you need to review and potentially re-align your strategies as well. Doing so can yield massive returns—a 2015 Aon Hewitt study showed a five percent increase in employee engagement can drive a three percent increase in revenue the following year!²

It’s time to say “yes” to employee engagement and Calabrio can help. Download our new white paper “The Definitive Primer on Contact Center Employee Engagement” today to learn more about WEM, including three key best practices to start you down the fastest path to success.

¹ Gartner, “The Essential Shift from Workforce Optimization to Workforce Engagement  Management.” May 24, 2016.
² Aon Hewitt, “2015 Trends in Global Employee Engagement.”

Kat Worman

Kat Worman has been working in the contact center industry longer than she cares to admit! With more than 20 years of experience, Kat has held numerous contact center positions including management, data analysis, strategic operations, and service level planning. Prior to joining Calabrio, Kat was a Principal Consultant specializing in the implementation of process and applications within the contact center. She has provided consulting services to Fortune 500 companies throughout North America, Europe and Australia. Kat specializes in partnering with key stakeholders and workforce planning teams to deliver unique solutions to contact center challenges.