Contact center workforce optimization (WFO) is the art of enhancing customer service agents' efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance.
Traditionally, contact centers have achieved this by developing workforce management (WFM) and quality assurance (QA) strategies.
Yet, with agent-assist, gamification, learning management, and more focus areas, WFO has evolved significantly from the days of Excel schedules and decade-old quality scorecards.
Now, CX Today has teamed up with Daniel Lloyd, Channel Director at Cirrus Response, to uncover some of the latest best practices from the WFO space.
1. Create a Connected Learning Strategy
QA is best as a team sport, with quality analysts, coaches, and supervisors joined at the hip.
Together, they should develop shared performance standards, identify and close performance gaps, and reinforce coaching, tracking its impact.
2. Build a Comprehensive View of Agent Performance
Centralize agent performance data into a customizable dashboard that displays critical metrics, including adherence, quality scores, handling times, etc.
With modern reporting solutions, leaders can connect data streams and spotlight insights into agent performance – across intents, channels, and shifts - leveraging rich data visualizations.
Such insights help to personalize coaching interventions and enhance performance.
3. Routinely Test Quality Scorecards
Contact center quality scorecards often include stale criteria and assumptions about what matters most to customers.
Running an exercise that assesses the correlation between quality and customer satisfaction scores will test whether the scorecard is measuring what matters most to customers.
The contact center can then evaluate positive customer conversations to spot new best practices, build those into the scorecard criteria, test, and optimize.
4. Use Quality Scorecards to Reinforce Performance Expectations
A quality scorecard sets clear performance standards. By sharing completed scorecards with agents - alongside the related call and screen recording - they can spot where they hit or missed expectations.
Calibration sessions also enable clarity around performance standards. With a QA system, agents can request such sessions to resolve scoring disagreements. The coach and the agent may then reflect on the interaction, discussing and defining what "good" performance means.
5. Build an Agent Learning Center
Everyone learns best through different means, whether reading, writing, listening, or visualizing. As such, some agents will better respond to some training materials than others.
Yet, by making some of those materials not only available in documents but in audio and visual formats – such as “how to” podcasts and videos – businesses can build an interactive learning center that raises the performance bar.
6. Manually Assess Outliers In Average Handling Time (AHT)
Quality analysts sometimes swerve evaluating contacts with long handling times, as they are under time constraints. Yet, these typically contain the most enlightening performance insights.
After all, there is likely a coaching gap, broken process, or missing knowledge that prevented a swift resolution – which the contact center should look to snuff out.
7. Extend QA Beyond Agent Performance
There's much more to a service experience than the agent-customer conversation. For instance, customers must search for the correct contact details, find the best-placed channel, endure the wait experience, and so on.
By building these into additional QA initiatives, the contact center can cover more bases and uncover new barriers to the ideal customer experience.
8. Utilize Screen Recordings in QA
Agents often fail to pick up new tech and employ workarounds, which can negatively impact their performance and increase handling times.
Quality analysts may miss these workarounds when they only have access to an audio recording. But, by utilizing screen recordings alongside call recordings, they can spot such workarounds and coach in a better approach while addressing agent concerns.
9. Monitor & Optimize Agent Proficiency
Agent proficiency measures how quickly new employees reach the expected performance level.
Actively monitoring this – with an Auto-QA system – helps supervisors to give additional support where most needed, level up performance, and increase early agent retention levels.
10. Make a Concerted Effort to Spot Agents Doing Good Things
In the contact center, one difficult conversation can knock an agent off their stride, hamper their motivation, and scupper their performance for the next few calls, hours, or even shifts.
Yet, with the latest Auto-QA platforms, supervisors can set up alerts when agents hit particular performance milestones, hot streaks, and objectives.
As such, they can continuously offer positive recognition to agents, which refills their desire to deliver excellent customer service.
11. Gather Customer Information Upfront
Agents spend much of their time asking a standard set of questions to resolve everyday customer queries. Now, with conversational AI, bots can gather that information before the live interaction, cutting handling times.
