Workforce optimisation results in robotic agents who are very good at following rules and procedures – but little else. Workforce engagement develops true problem solvers, opportunity creators and brand ambassadors.
It’s hardly surprising that you see a lot of talk around contact centre agent empowerment these days. Harvard Business Review1 (HBR) found that contact centres with empowered agents – those who enjoy the autonomy to use their own experience and judgement, as well as advice and guidance from their peers - perform 50% better than average. At the same time, this “network judgment” climate, as HBR calls it, reduces the risk of agent mistakes by 25% when compared to contact centres working under traditional cultures. Real-life experience points in the same direction – engaged and empowered workers simply deliver better results.
With this in mind, it is astonishing that many contact centre operators are still obsessed with conservative efficiency goals and strict adherence to rules and procedures. These all too often turn agents into contact answering robots, while creativity and personal judgement (so appreciated in other corporate departments) remain very low on priority lists.
Evolving From Workforce Optimisation to Workforce Engagement
The questions here are: How can you expect your agents to use creativity and focus on the delivery of superb experiences when you press them with rigid Average Handling Time (AHT) objectives? How can you expect agents to insert comprehensive follow-up info (invaluable for CX management, sales, retention and acquisition) into your CRM if you impose strict After Call Work (ACW) targets? And how can you expect agents to help their peers if you force uncompromising occupancy objectives?
The short answer is that you can’t: These are irreconcilable contradictions. And realising this is the key to evolving from workforce optimisation to workforce engagement.
This fixation on efficiency comes from a bygone age, when agents handled simple tasks in far less competitive business environments – and when contact centres were seen solely as cost centres.
Today, in the age of the experience economy, agents’ tasks are very different, and contact centres contribute to the organisation in many different ways. The contact centre’s new status as a profit (rather than a cost) centre goes far beyond outbound campaigns and service-to-sales (S2S) activities.
And key to this is empowered agents. The first step towards engaged agents lies in defocusing (but not abandoning) from traditional objectives – and creating an entirely new KPI logic on which contact centre performance can be measured and judged.
Most importantly, the contact centre’s impact on overall CX should be identified and quantified. Elements like First Contact Resolution (FCR), Agent Experience, post-interaction Net Promoter Score, customer complaints, compliments and similar – should all be part of the equation. And CX should be precisely correlated with customer loyalty (advocacy, purchasing, retention) and lifetime value.