In 2022, only 48 percent of contact centers had the necessary staffing to meet customer demand. Fast forward 12 months, and that figure jumped to 58 percent.
The research firm Metrigy pinpoints several drivers for this positive trend. Those include an uptick in agent-assist tech deployments and a hike in rep salaries.
Yet, perhaps most interestingly, it found that external employees are doing more to support the contact center.
Indeed, 47 percent of companies are now drafting staff members from outside the contact center to support agents in resolving customer queries.
Amongst those businesses, 30 percent have external employees conversing directly with customers without a formal agent in the loop.
As the gap between CCaaS and UCaaS platforms closes, Magnus Geverts, VP of Product Marketing at Calabrio, anticipates that more businesses will move in this direction.
“With increasing automation of transactional tasks, the contact center requires higher competency and often needs to tap into expertise from across the organization,” he said.
“Therefore, as the contact center of the future will extend far beyond traditional boundaries, it necessitates more efficient resource management.”
Already, Calabrio is supporting many of its clients in executing the extended contact center by piecing together a next-generation, far-reaching resource management strategy. Here’s how.
Centralizing Staff Management
For the boundaryless enterprise contact center to operate smoothly, workforce management teams must centralize their staff management strategy.
That requires a ubiquitous WFM platform, like Calabrio, that overlays their various enterprise communications solutions.
Indeed, Calabrio can integrate different telephony and digital channel environments, pooling customer demand data and staff across departments and locations - regardless of the CCaaS solution they leverage.
While doing so, WFM teams can also centrally monitor service levels and adherence, simplifying the traditional intraday management side of WFM – according to Geverts.
“These customers are also more likely to implement automated employee self-service functionality, such as PTO-requests and self-scheduling in the back-office segment, compared to the adoption of intraday management,” he added.
Lastly, Calabrio can overlay its automated quality assurance (Auto-QA) solution across the enterprise, offering performance feedback to every person, inside and outside of the formal contact center.
Optimizing Informal Agent Schedules
With a centralized, detailed overview of demand data, brands can leverage Calabrio to build accurate forecasts and schedules – spotlighting reporting periods when the formal contact center will have too few staff.