Workforce Optimization (WFO)

Workforce optimization (WFO) software combines recording, quality management (QM) and other call center technologies into one console to oversee call center performance. A WFO suite typically includes tools for workforce management, quality monitoring, liability recording, coaching and eLearning, performance management, surveying and speech analytics. The technology brings together and reports on many different functions within the enterprise – from the call center to the back-office.

Workforce Management Optimization (WFM)

Workforce management (WFM) is an integrated set of processes that a company uses to optimize the productivity of its employees. WFM involves effectively forecasting labor requirements and creating and managing staff schedules to accomplish a particular task on a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis.

WFM systems enable organizations to gain insights into such business metrics as the exact number of employees needed to complete a particular job at a given time of the day, week or month. It also helps track employees’ daily performance.

Quality Assurance (QA)

Quality assurance (QA) is any systematic process of determining whether a product or service meets specified requirements. QA establishes and maintains set requirements for developing or manufacturing reliable products. A quality assurance system is meant to increase customer confidence and a company’s credibility, while also improving work processes and efficiency, and it enables a company to better compete with others.

Better Customer Outcomes

Contact centers exist to serve customers, but traditional solutions have often seemed to fall short of fulfilling their promise. Confusing phone trees, endless on-hold times, ineffective agents and inconsistent problem resolution make for a bad customer experience, which in turn can jeopardize the entire business.

CCaaS solutions also seamlessly integrate email, social media, mobile, and real-time chat into a unified platform that promotes the tracking of information among those channels. They can also track customer wait times and high call-volume periods, enabling you to adjust resources accordingly and deliver a better customer support experience.

Better Agent Experience

Conventional contact centers hamper the effectiveness of service representatives in two key ways: 1) Customer, product and other information is usually separated among disparate, siloed systems; and 2) single-function servers and antiquated PBX technologies make it difficult to sift through customer data – especially when customers are now communicating via so many channels.

CCaaS solutions offer businesses the opportunity to deploy “connected agents” by serving as hubs that synthesize all critical information onto a single screen. This saves services representatives the time-consuming pain of toggling among different data sources, delivering vast storehouses of in-house knowledge, and providing access to third-party cloud services with critical information such as Salesforce.

In addition to matching the right agent to customers based on skillsets, screen pop-ups can provide representatives with information about previous purchases and billing history as well as behavioral, demographic and location-based customer data. Not only can this increase customer satisfaction, but it can also deliver improvements in upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Significant Cost-Savings

Moving to a cloud-based, omnichannel CCaaS solution essentially mirrors the substantial cost savings that most “as a service” cloud migrations offer.

The simple fact that CCaaS doesn’t require businesses to purchase extra servers or pay for more floor space or power can save multiple tens of thousands of dollars a year. You also don’t have to pay for maintenance or upgrades, and you can scale up as needed – paying only for what you need.

Businesses experience other, less visible cost-savings benefits. For example, because CCaaS providers provide reporting and supervisory tools for agent monitoring, businesses can expect to manage more calls with fewer agents. That translates into greater productivity and headcount savings.

Scalability, Reliability, and Availability

One of the universal benefits of a cloud contact center solution is that it allows organizations to instantly scale to meet business and customer demands – including the ability to add or subtract the number of agents. Gone are the days that you need to purchase additional capacity that you may never need, pay for software licenses that go unused or buy expensive servers or storage to answer unexpected upticks. The cloud mantra has always been to pay only for what you use.

CCaaS solutions also offer the highest levels of availability, reliability and disaster recovery, as most providers guarantee uptime as high as 99.99% by housing the infrastructure in geographically redundant data centers. These data centers are also staffed around the clock.

Reporting and Analytics

If providing an exceptional customer experience is your goal – and if you’re operating a contact center, it should be your top priority – then the ability to gather, measure, analyze and leverage customer insights is an imperative. Today’s most competitive CCaaS providers offer capabilities that quickly integrate and analyze interactions across multiple channels to deliver the type of data businesses need to achieve meaningful service improvements.

Today’s contact center reporting and analytics tools enable businesses to: track the number of abandoned calls, record and review calls to identify insufficient training, receive alerts whenever agents use ambiguous or questionable words or phrases, obtain context-sensitive call scripts, monitor and automatically adjust caller queues and voice response menus on the fly.