One machine can do the work of fifty people. But, no machine can ever do the work of an emotionally intelligent person. This article explains why you should aim for a combination of chatbots and real agents to best serve your customers and boost productivity.
Contact centers have an important role to play to keep people informed and calm during the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. When customers panic, they usually pick up the phone. But what do you do when your demand spikes? What if your wait times increase due to lack of front-line staff? How do you focus on your customers' experience during this crisis?
Managing costs in a contact center is an important part of any workforce management organization. Labor costs are generally the largest costs in a business. In many organizations, the cost of employees can be ⅔ or ¾ of their total costs! For that reason, WFM software plays vital role in cost reduction.
Employee engagement can be a huge problem. The latest employee engagement trend report by Quantum Workplace reports that 30% of the workforce is moderately engaged at best (that is 1 out of 3 employees!). Another study, by Cornell University, reports that contact centers experience a 25% to 33% attrition rate on average. But depending on the size of the center and the industry, average turnover rates are between 45% and 60%. In extreme cases, turnover rates have even exceeded 100%; that means the entire workforce was replaced within one year.
In our blog post “Call center scheduling: 2 simple methods to measure efficiency” we have already mentioned that scheduling is one of the most complex tasks in a contact center. That’s why to measure and maintain schedule efficiency, you may require workforce management (WFM) software. While there are a lot of great WFM applications out there, they are often loaded with features that are hard to understand. We have consolidated our top 5 features that you should focus on when schedule efficiency is your main goal: