By Beecher Tuttle
To succeed in the current economic climate, enterprises need to make customer service a top priority. This task is complicated by the myriad of new channels that today's customers use to contact companies, including social media, email, phone and corporate websites.
In addition, organizations today often maintain a dispersed workforce, making it even more difficult to track and assess communications between employees and customers. In this complicated environment, enterprises need to find ways to evaluate the performance of customer-facing employees, influence their engagement levels with clients and develop routing rules for accurate employee scheduling.
Maximizing employee potential can be aided by a workforce optimization (WFO) strategy that brings training, quality management, customer survey tools, job scheduling, job forecasting, quality assurance, career development and analytics all under one roof.
A WFO strategy, also known as an Employee Effectiveness Model, helps companies identify workforce needs before they become serious while also providing insight into employee gaps and profiles. WFO solutions can also recognize passively engaged employees, giving management the knowledge necessary to filter out lower-tier employees while motivating top-tier workers.
Solutions like Alcatel-Lucent's Genesys Workforce Optimization Suite enable organizations to plan and develop the right staffing levels, optimize routing, enable continuous feedback through monitoring and coaching, as well as identify and analyze employee competency gaps.
Alternative legacy systems that handle functions like quality assurance, workforce management, coaching, e-learning and customer feedback are too passive, and are often siloed, leading to more overhead.
On the other hand, a holistic approach to quality management and performance optimization – as provided by the Genesys Workforce Optimization Suite – can streamline the process, eliminating the latency delays and unnecessary overhead costs that are often associated with managing employee competencies and developing talent pools.
In a recent white paper, “Staffing and Workload Management: Challenges and Opportunities,” Alcatel-Lucent explains the benefits of an employee effectiveness model and unveils the five key steps in ensuring a more engaged, efficient and effective organization – how to plan, deliver, control, analyze and develop a workforce optimization strategy.