What came first the chicken or the egg? Happy customers or happy employees?

Tommy Palomäki at Teleopti considers the connection between happy customers and happy employees and suggests five ways to use workforce management to achieve both.

What came first: the chicken or the egg?  It’s a conundrum that’s baffled people for years but does it really matter?  The same could apply in contact centers.  Why debate whether happy customers or happy staff come first when the two are inextricably linked?  It is commonly accepted that motivated, engaged agents result in positive customer outcomes with many studies indicating a strong correlation between customer and employee satisfaction. So how can workforce management (WFM) help to achieve both?

Five ways to use WFM for happy employees and happy customers

Take a look at your contact center.  Are your agents happy?  If not, why not?  What motivates them to go the extra mile and what do you need to do to attract and keep the best people? Gone are the days when agents were not expected to think for themselves and sat with headsets on, answering routine enquiries all day long.  Digitalization, a mobile work ethic (if you’re not happy, you simply go elsewhere) and a growing customer-centric approach to doing business have turned this outmoded perception on its head.  Today’s multi-skilled agents are highly prized assets, the frontline to customers with the power to make or break customer experiences, corporate reputations and profitability.

Agents like to feel they are valued, engaged and have the opportunity to make a real difference to the company they work for.  Using the latest WFM including a life-style and self-service dimension is central to understanding and galvanizing this human factor to ensure happy and  profitable customers.  Use WFM to:

1. Make life easier – minimize the stress of stretched resources by using automated forecasting and intra-day scheduling to right-size your contact center throughout the day or run ‘what if’ scenarios to better prepare for busy seasonal periods or special marketing campaigns.

Then let automation take away the monotony of handling routine enquiries using Artificial Intelligence solutions or “bots”.  This leaves well scheduled agents free to do the clever stuff like helping customers with highly emotive or sensitive issues or turning around upset or angry customers – all the things that spur them on to excel rather than just do a good enough job.

2. Empower agents - by giving them control over their working lives.  Through self-service, allow them to select breaks and lunches, swap shifts, advise overtime availability and request time off with immediate feedback.  If working from home is easier, let the latest web-based WFM technology give them the option to log in securely using their own devices including tablets and other mobile devices to check schedules, coaching and training sessions.

3. Retain the best – as the role of agents becomes more strategic, they can expect higher wages and better prospects.  Companies need to work harder at attracting and then keeping the best talent.  Use WFM to develop an effective skills matrix to keep up-to-date with agent skills and training and use the information to support tailored personal development plans, one-to-one sessions and meaningful career paths in a proactive way.

Introduce the latest gamification features to motivate employees, provide a forum for sharing top tips, encourage healthy competition and reward individual and team performance in a fun environment.

4. Build a team of ambassadors – like all technology, the more you use it, the more confident you become to the point where you fervently champion it.  The same applies to WFM.  Keep an eye out for these new champions in the contact center and make them ambassadors of WFM to boost agent involvement and the role of technology to help deliver outstanding customer service.

5. Close the loop – your agents might be your new customers but close the loop with end customers to provide a seamless, end-to-end experience.  Listen to your agents, on the frontline, they know if your customers are happy, what works and what doesn’t.  Devise a mechanism for agents to share best practice – building in time for workshops to hear what works in terms of scheduling and suggestions from the floor as to how it could be improved and remember to celebrate any successful changes adopted as a result.

The more you understand what makes your agents and customers tick, the more effective you’ll be at creating a well-balanced contact center inside and out. Then whether the chicken or the egg came first becomes irrelevant it’s a continuous virtuous circle of happy employees and customers.

Source: https://blog.teleopti.com/2018/08/24/what-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-happy-customers-or-happy-employees/

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1.)

Agara Agara is an autonomous virtual voice agent powered by Real-time Voice AI. It is designed to have intelligent conversations with your customers, vendors, and partners without any assistance from human agents. It can handle a wide variety of calls including inbound customer care calls, outbound lead generation calls, appointment scheduling calls, and overdue payment recovery calls. Agara is available for several industries including banking, insurance, retail, e-commerce, airlines, and telecom. Powered by advanced Real-time Voice AI that understands speech in real-time, automatically determines the right process to follow and guides the caller along in the process with natural conversation.

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Auraya EVA Voice Biometrics Powered by Auraya's patented ArmorVox engine, EVA is a voice biometric extension that provides secure and seamless identification & verification capabilities for Amazon Connect. EVA provides delightful customer experience by removing the friction of providing PINs, passwords or secret information in order to prove caller identity. EVA comes standard with active and passive modes and a simple yet powerful agent interface. This allows for personalised self-service and a more friendly and efficient experience when interacting with an agent. Outdated security methods such as PINs, passwords and security questions have become insecure and unreliable. Forgetting passwords and security answers o... (read more)Powered by Auraya's patented ArmorVox engine, EVA is a voice biometric extension that provides secure and seamless identification & verification capabilities for Amazon Connect. EVA provides delightful customer experience by removing the friction of providing PINs, passwords or secret information in order to prove caller identity. EVA comes standard with active and passive modes and a simple yet powerful agent interface. This allows for personalised self-service and a more friendly and efficient experience when interacting with an agent. Outdated security methods such as PINs, passwords and security questions have become insecure and unreliable. Forgetting passwords and security answers or switching applications to access OTPs can result in inefficient and cumbersome customer experience. Time is wasted trying to verify customers with insecure methods. EVA works in English out of the box but can be configured to work in languages other than English. Recognising what specific digits are spoken using EVA's native speech recognition is only available for the English language out of the box. EVA has additional capabilities such as real-time fraud detection and digital channel enrolment and verification options that can be turned on with customisation services from Amazon Connect consulting partners. If you are interested in these additional features, please contact an Amazon Connect consulting partner that is an authorised Auraya reseller partner.

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Call Adapt Soundboard Software Call Adapt is a cloud-based digital soundboard application designed for contact centers. It works with any type of call and integrates with your existing dialer system. Powered by smart audio technology, Call Adapt gives your agents the ability to converse with customers in real time using programmed keyboard shortcuts. The result is perfect pitch delivery and less time spent on repetitive tasks.

4.)	Cognigy Cognigy is a global leader in Conversational AI Automation. Its platform, Cognigy.AI, enables enterprises to automate customer and employee communications using intelligent voice and chatbots

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Consilium Software Consilium UniCloud™ UniCloud™ is an intuitive platform that allows Enterprises to deploy and manage their Unified Communication (UC) and Contact Center (CC) services with ease and entire provisioning can be completed in seconds using this comprehensive tool supporting digital transformation. The latest release 7.0 of UniCloud™ is a multi-tenant platform that transforms the delivery, management, and integration of collaboration and contact center solutions, for both Cloud and On-Premise deployment models. With its single-pane-of-glass views and quick provisioning tool, UniCloud™ is instrumental in reducing the time to provision an entire multi-cluster Cisco collaboration platform, including contact centers (C... (read more)UniCloud™ is an intuitive platform that allows Enterprises to deploy and manage their Unified Communication (UC) and Contact Center (CC) services with ease and entire provisioning can be completed in seconds using this comprehensive tool supporting digital transformation. The latest release 7.0 of UniCloud™ is a multi-tenant platform that transforms the delivery, management, and integration of collaboration and contact center solutions, for both Cloud and On-Premise deployment models. With its single-pane-of-glass views and quick provisioning tool, UniCloud™ is instrumental in reducing the time to provision an entire multi-cluster Cisco collaboration platform, including contact centers (CCX, UCCE, and PCCE), communications managers (CUCM), voicemail (Unity Connection) and IM & Presence by up to 85% which leads to the faster onboarding process for a new customer. A Self-Care portal within UniCloud™ is effectively managing services specific automation of MACDs (moves, adds, changes and deletes) allowing end-users to perform Day-2 related tasks of their own while reducing the basic operations workload of support teams. Consilium UniCloud™ enables enterprises and service providers to manage and automate the delivery of Cisco-based Unified Communications as a service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a service (CCaaS) offerings using single, centralized management and easy-to-use administration interface, with role-based access providing granular control over permissions, limiting potentially unauthorized or inadvertent transactions. With its unified portal for UC and contact center provisioning, multi-tenancy and single-pane-of-glass views and tools, UniCloud™ introduces turn-key efficiency in onboarding new customers, provisioning of users, agents, teams, skill groups, and devices, or their migration from non-Cisco platforms to Cisco, and also provides centralized management and monitoring.

6.)	eGain Corporation eGain Solve Proven, Easy, and Guided Journey to Automate Customer Engagement in a Digital+AI World

7.)	Emmersion Automated Language Testing Emmersion offers automated assessments to quickly and accurately test speaking, writing, and grammar fluency in 9 languages and counting. We help contact centers improve CSAT scores by screening for top talent and retaining top performers.

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OpsTel Services SPEED & PLUS The SPEED solution solves for service level issues while cost optimizing the environment with automation. Provides an enhanced way to speed up & optimize invoking temporary agent skills configuration changes into the contact center environment. Speed allows you to schedule both future changes & temporary changes that auto-revert back to the original state when scheduled time expires. Speed features: *Automated / Scheduled Temporary Agent Skills Configuration Management *Immediate Temporary or Reoccurring Schedule Skills Configuration Changes *Easy to Use/Operations Administration Focused *Descriptive Monitoring Activity Dashboard *Detailed “End to End’ Audit Trail and Perfor... (read more)The SPEED solution solves for service level issues while cost optimizing the environment with automation. Provides an enhanced way to speed up & optimize invoking temporary agent skills configuration changes into the contact center environment. Speed allows you to schedule both future changes & temporary changes that auto-revert back to the original state when scheduled time expires. Speed features: *Automated / Scheduled Temporary Agent Skills Configuration Management *Immediate Temporary or Reoccurring Schedule Skills Configuration Changes *Easy to Use/Operations Administration Focused *Descriptive Monitoring Activity Dashboard *Detailed “End to End’ Audit Trail and Performance Monitoring & PLUS provides a single interface, where operations teams no longer have to rely on HR, IT or any other organization to administer agent profile data across multiple technologies in the contact center. The PLUS solution allows for simplified provisioning & maintenance of agent profile data reducing processing time from days, weeks or months in LESS THAN 10 MINUTES! The PLUS features: *Agent Provisioning Cycle Time Reduced from Days/Weeks to 10 Minutes or Less *Fully Automated Agent Onboarding / Updating / Maintaining / and Offboarding of Agent Profiles (Identity, Access, Utilization) *Overlays and Enhances Existing Contact Center Solution Set *Enables Operations Staff to Maintain all Aspects of Managing an Agent’s Profile through “Single Pane of Glass” *Supports Multi-Faceted Agent Profile Attribute Configuration Requirements; e.g. Union Rules, Seniority Dates, Etc. *Detailed Agent Profile Audit Trails

 

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