Workforce Optimization for Contact Centers,
A How-To Guide

A white paper from

Introduction
As the global economy challenges businesses, human-centric organizations such as contact centers struggle as they fight to control costs yet continue to generate revenues for their companies.

Technology investments historically have proven to save costs and improve productivity, especially in contact centers.However, when budgets tighten planned technology investments are put on hold.When contact center budgets - always tight - are stretched thinner and thinner, contact center managers increasingly ask themselves, "How can I do more with less?" And as budgets continue to constrict, managers wonder, "What will this budget loss cost us?Lower quality and decreased customer satisfaction?Reduced revenues?Increased employee turnover?" The fundamental question becomes, how can a contact center tighten its belt without compromising quality of service, revenues and customer satisfaction?

Datamonitor projects that 2008 will be a difficult year for contact centers but believes that "technology remains the best lever for getting more value from your employees by making them more productive."Not all contact centers have that luxury. Doing "more with less" means examining the organization and discovering how to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of the workforce.

Given the high cost of human resources, contact centers can recognize enormous cost savings - and/or profit increases - by fully understanding how employees do their jobs by interacting with current technologies.Having that information empowers organizations to learn from their best performers and giving all agents the processes and information that empower all employees to excel.

This article offers practical advice on how you can turn the expenses associated with your two most critical resources - employees and technology - into valued and effective investments.

Workforce Optimization for Contact Centers during Challenging Economic Times
A contact center’s highest expenses are its people and its technology, with agents alone accounting for approximately two-thirds of overhead costs.The following money-saving and revenue generating suggestions will help contact centers weather the current economic conditions and stay competitive during today’s challenging times. At their core is a simple concept: make the most of your people by optimizing the business processes they follow and giving them the information they need to be successful.

Optimize Business Processes

1. Compare documented processes to actual processes followed.
Are employees actually following the expected processes or do they improvise?Are documented processes out of date?Are these varying processes more or less effective?Deviation from expected processes may be an indicator of obsolete or ineffective processes.Comparing documented processes to the processes actually followed can tell you a lot about what your organization operates and how you can make the necessary modifications to enhance productivity.

2. Understand how agents execute business processes and optimize them.
Are your business processes as good as they can be?Review business processes and understand how employees implement them.What improvements can you make?Are employees losing time switching between applications?Do they have to hunt for information that could be easily provided?These activities affect the overall effectiveness of an organization.Use dedicated Workforce Optimization software to conduct detailed time and motion studies to help you understand how you can provide the best possible support.

3. Automate tasks that can be automated, and detect and remove redundant tasks.
Are there redundant tasks you can remove?Tools that can make processes go faster?When you have hundreds or thousands of people doing the same task many times each day, automating that task can save tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity costs.

4. Identify and promote best practices.
Take a good look at your top agents and understand what they’re doing that works so well.Maybe they’ve found a way to improve your processes.Identify the best practices these agents use and actively promote them throughout your organization.

Improve Through Information

5. Give agents the personalized training they need to ensure success.
Observe how your employees do their jobs and discover where each stumbles.Today’s Workforce Optimization tools allow you to see exactly how agents follow processes and how long each step takes.Use this valuable information to help managers provide the personalized training each agent needs to be successful.Also make sure to train your teams on expected best practices.By giving your team the training and tools they need to excel, you’ll reduce frustration, raise job satisfaction, and retain your most valuable and expensive resource - your people.

6. Provide real-time guidance to cross-sell and up-sell.
Are your agents cross-selling and up-selling at every opportunity?Are they offering the right things to the right people?Are they providing the most up-to-date and accurate information to their customer?Are they following compliance guidelines correctly?Give agents tools that prompt and guide them in real time during calls to make sure they are offering a right options to customers at the right times.This basic step can generate millions in additional sales.

7. Enable information-driven reactions in real time.
Can you respond to calls in real-time in the most efficient way possible?If you process and analyze information as it comes in, you can enable information-driven reactions, which dramatically improves contact center efficiency.Real-time analytics help your agents solve the customers’ problem the first time, boosting their access to the information and relevant knowledge needed for the issue at hand.Analytics can also help you segment customers and prioritize problems to make the best use of agents’ skills and availability, reducing the risk of customer frustration and lost revenues.

8. Watch the money.
Monitor transactions in real-time and receive alerts about high-value transactions while they’re in progress. Make sure they’re handled perfectly.Simply improving the experience for high-value customers can generate significant revenue.

Provide the Right Tools

9. Don’t pay for software you don’t use: detect and eliminate unnecessary applications.
Look at the applications used on agents’ desktops.Understand how they are being used and evaluate whether these applications still provide value to your business.Are you paying for some SaaS applications and getting good value?Do you have legacy systems that aren’t being used but that still invoke maintenance costs?Trimming unnecessary software expenses often provides unexpected relief for your organization.

10. Provide the tools agents need to be efficient.
Understand the tasks your agents need to accomplish, and take the time to discover what tools will help them do their jobs most efficiently.Automating tasks (especially repetitive ones), installing new software to accomplish specific functions, providing software to guide agents, and augmenting or reconfiguring existing software capabilities can save copious time and money.

11.Make sure employees are using their tools effectively.
This suggestion breaks down into several areas:

Make the most of the systems you have.If you’ve invested in expensive software, make sure you are using its full range of capabilities to increase productivity.For example, perhaps some employees are still using an older version of your expensive CRM software that is slower, contains fewer features, and is more difficult to support.Today’s software packages are very robust - not taking advantage of their features impacts your return on that investment, and you could be missing out on capabilities that could improve your business.
Often times, even the most well-meaning employees bypass necessary steps in order to accomplish their goals and make their numbers…without realizing that shortcuts may have negative impact elsewhere, such as violating security policies and causing compliance errors.For example, perhaps agents are using email for expediency rather than going through proper methods.This opens your organization to real cost threats. Understand how your employees use your systems so can tell you if you are getting the most of your technology investments.

Find the time-wasters.Are some employees spending too much time on the Internet, web, or even searching for job-related information or their next vacation?By understanding how your employees spend their time, you produce specific actions so your employees can make the most of your technology investments.

Manage the Workload

12. Balance the workload.
Do some of your agents end up with more than their share of work because they are experts?Overloading your best performers can exhaust and frustrate them, which affects the quality of service they give.Or maybe some employees are fantastic in certain areas but less than stellar in others?Make sure employees are matched with the right calls and other contacts in their areas of expertise, and make sure the contacts are spread evenly throughout your group.This way you make the most of everyone’s skills.The best agents won’t groan under heavy loads, and the lower performers can still contribute and feel valuable as they build their skills.

13. Accurately forecast loads and monitor them in real time.
You almost certainly already know how many calls you receive in an average day, and how long the average call lasts.But do you know how long agents spend in each process?In each step?In each screen?Use Workforce Optimization tools to monitor not just how many calls you receive, but exactly how your agents spend the time on calls.You’ll be better able to forecast loads and ensure that you have the just right number of people available.

Also consider that in order to manage workloads most effectively, you must respond to workload fluctuations in real time so that you can handle unexpected workloads spikes and still maintain customer satisfaction.If you’re not monitoring workload in real time, you won’t realize you’ve had a problem until the next day…which is far too late to keep your customers happy or save that lost sale.

14. Make sure your agents follow the schedule.
You go to a lot of trouble to create a schedule for your agents.Is everyone following it?Does the coverage get a little too light right after lunch?Do certain individuals consistently begin working a few minutes later than they’re scheduled to?With the right tools, it’s easy to see who is working (and on what) at any given time.Armed with this information, you can address any issues and make the most of the resources you have…before your service quality suffers.

Look Beyond the Contact Center

15. Control risk.
Make sure everyone in your company complies with internal policies and regulatory requirements.When you ensure that PCI, HIPAA, and other industry standards are followed, you control risk and avoid non-compliance fees…or worse, an expensive lawsuit.Today’s Workforce Optimization tools can be configured to collect detailed data and notify you when suspicious or unauthorized activities occur…or even alert you before they happen! You can even prompt employees if they are about to violate policies or compliance procedures that they may be unaware of, so you can stop problems before they occur.

In today’s security sensitive environments, the human is the weakest link.Detecting fraudulent activities in real time with Workforce Optimization tools can mitigate continued sacrifices, saving enormous amounts of previously unrecognized losses but also avoiding the negative publicity a company can receive with such events.

16. Enable home agents and remote workers.
Your operating costs go down and employee satisfaction goes up when employees can work from home and other remote locations.Technology now enables not only call routing to distributed agents, but real-time monitoring of their activities so that you can ensure that work is being done and quality service is delivered…even when agents are outside of the corporate boundaries.

17. Apply the same principles in the back office and branch operations.
Almost all of the advice and enabling technologies discussed in this paper apply equally well to back office and branch operations.Make sure you’re applying the same process improvement focus throughout your organization utilizing Workforce Optimization tools.

Iontas’ Focus Software Suite

How can you implement these valuable suggestions?
Iontas’ Focus software suite is used in contact centers worldwide to provide exactly the kind of detailed knowledge you need to fully realize the benefits from these recommendations.Focus works as a 21st-century efficiency expert, producing full time-and-motion studies for every employee…hour by hour and minute by minute, every day, regardless of location. With Focus, you can understand exactly how agents are doing their jobs, so you provide them with the tools, processes, and information they need to be more effective in their jobs.

Focus works by gathering granular usage data directly through the operating system, so it works with any Windows application…without integration (in fact, you can use it to share data between front and back office applications).Any authorized manager can quickly respond to business process changes and reconfigure Focus to capture new performance metrics, all in a matter of minutes.

Only Focus collects performance metrics from all software applications and enables you to act on that data in real time.

Summary
Using the advice presented in this paper, contact centers can recognize remarkable productivity improvements and increased revenues with even the most limited of budgets.

Workforce Optimization Technology such as Iontas’ Focus software suite helps Contact centers work smarter to save on operating costs while at the same time improving service quality and increasing corporate profitability. Although they are typically cost centers for a business, contact centers can apply these recommendations to transform themselves into corporate profit centers by increasing the revenue generated by each contact.

And, by giving your employees the tools, processes, and information they need to excel, you lay the foundation for happier agents as well as more productive ones.These best practices reduce employee frustration and improve job satisfaction, so you’ll be able to retain your valuable, trained employees and reduce the costs associated with contact centers’ traditionally-high churn.

Finally, all of these recommendations lead to higher quality customer service and happier customers, which provides yet another boost to your bottom line.If you want to stay competitive in today’s tight economy, you can’t afford not to make the most of your people and technology investments!