The Future of Workforce Management: 5 Reasons to Reimagine Your WFM Transitioning

Your contact center agents are literally the face and voice of your organization. But retaining and managing a high-quality staff is more challenging than ever. Today’s contact center employees demand flexible schedules, meaningful work and telework options. And with the current job market, you will lose talented agents if you cannot accommodate these needs.

We get it. Life happens. That’s why you need workforce management software that provides the flexibility your employees demand to balance their work responsibilities with the rest of their busy lives. This includes:

• Flexible Time Off Requests – Enable employees to request time off and make-up time in a single request, so they can make up missed time rather than being marked late.
• Task Switching – Change up the tasks agents are working on, so they get a break from having to just work on the phone all day.
• Shift Swaps – Allow employees with schedule conflicts to trade shifts with a coworker, to simplify schedule changes and increase workplace flexibility.
• Mobile Apps – Enable employees to manage their schedules on the go—after all, scheduling flexibility doesn’t help much if they need to be tied to their desktops to make changes.
• Staggered Start Times and Zoning – Due to social distancing rules, scheduling will need to factor in staggered start/break/lunch times, as well as zoning to ensure adequate distance is keep in hallways, elevators, and cubicles.

Walking into a contact center can feel like going back in time. Outdated, difficult-to-use applications look nothing like the modern apps we use in our daily lives. Creating forecasts and managing employee scheduling is a tough enough job without having to fight with inadequate tools.

Modern WFM applications should make common tasks more efficient for WFM managers, so they can spend less time building and modifying schedules. And an easy-to-use system means less time needed to train new users.

It’s also necessary to make employee scheduling easier for your employees and supervisors. Today’s employees want mobile apps to quickly check and change their schedules, request time off, bid for and swap shifts, and more.

Similarly, supervisors should be able to manage incoming time off requests from their mobile device as well. This flexibility and agility on the go is critical for how today’s employees want to work.

Did you know that only 14% of back offices have fully automated tracking of work against SLAs? This means that you likely have a huge blind spot when it comes to efficiently managing work within your organization.

The benefits you already get with WFM can grow dramatically as you expand to the back office. You can gain a single view into all the employees who impact the customer experience, including their respective skills and availability to handle workload. And you can use that insight to deploy available, cross-trained staff in different departments when the need arises.

As you grow, be sure to manage work efficiently across your entire enterprise, not just your contact center.

As pandemic restrictions are eased, many organizations are gradually bringing contact center agents back to the office.

To do this safely, you must now incorporate new regulations around safe distancing, health checks, desk hygiene, and more, while still providing the high level of service your customers demand.

Verint Workforce Management provides the automated workflows to allow organizations to meet these new challenges at their own pace.