What factors determine whether a contact center interaction produces a positive outcome? Often, it’s the agent that makes the difference, but this doesn’t tell the whole story. How was the “right agent” trained? Why was the call routed to that employee? What business systems supported the interaction? To ensure the quality of every customer interaction, contact center managers need a business system – a repeatable approach.
Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) is a practice designed to improve outcomes in contact center and back-office communication environments. WEM solutions incorporate combinations of call recording, quality assurance, workforce management, speech analytics, e-learning and analytics.
WEM methods and tools simply support solid business management practices for contact centers and other communications-based business processes. Adopting a disciplined approach to WEM activities is key to the growth of any contact center. In this ConvergeOne blog series, we will explore our approach to WEM in terms of six steps, each defined by added functionality that builds upon the prior steps of your WEM journey.
Step 1: Laying the Groundwork for WEM
Many industries have compliance needs with call-recording requirements, so the journey to WEM usually begins with call/contact recording and screen capture. The most common recording requirements are associated with compliance and risk mitigation. Regulations include the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which applies to any customer contact that involves accepting payments via credit card. Achieving PCI compliance requires a very deliberate and targeted approach. With the approval of GDPR, all companies will need to be more diligent than ever regarding their customers’ data privacy. Without a plan, the process is difficult, and the chance of failure is high.
The key to compliance often lies with blocking access to sensitive information, not only during the interaction, but on playback as well – and, in the event of an audit, demonstrating that this was done correctly. The design of your recording system must account for whether to record calls only or calls plus data from the agent’s desktop.
But, as useful and necessary as call recording is, it provides only an essential foundation for WEM capabilities.
Step 2: Ensuring Personalized Experiences with Quality Assurance and Coaching
The next step on the journey to WEM is quality assurance (QA). Many companies set goals for customer satisfaction or go to even greater depth by measuring customer effectiveness or Net Promoter Value. Quality Assurance is one of the key measurements supporting all these targets.
To measure QA and support corporate goals, Contact Center managers typically set performance goals, then set up evaluation forms to measure progress toward those goals. To perform rankings, managers closely listen to a sample of an agent’s recorded calls and apply scoring criteria. Such rankings are used during coaching sessions, and often become part of the employee’s record. Many organizations use such measurements to set goals for performance, and even conduct contests with positive reinforcements (prizes) to reward top performers.
Today, WEM solutions can provide the capability to companies to evaluate 100% of the interactions recorded using any channel. Without this, most companies can only evaluate 5-10% of their interactions. Think of the power behind evaluating all the interactions! Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, coupled with analytics and transcription, can systematically evaluate more without human intervention. AI will enable new trends in customer behavior to be identified at very early stages in their development.
Businesses can achieve an optimal customer experience if they are able to understand and personalize the customer’s journey. With predictive analytics, you can get valuable insights to enhance the customer experience by assigning the right conversation to the right agents in an automated fashion with a high degree of accuracy.
Continue to part two of this blog series for more tips, or download the full white paper below.
