Each one of these applications is well-understood by contact center professionals and is available from a number of suppliers. Coincidentally, each of these applications has spawned the creation of functional silos within contact centers that at first improve performance but eventually make it impossible to continue improving.

A useful way to think about workforce optimization is to view it as a data-driven process to identify and close employee skill gaps. And because it is a business process itself, workforce optimization not only addresses staff development needs but also provides the opportunity to re-engineer and streamline existing fragmented and time-consuming legacy contact center management processes.

Don’t make the mistake in thinking that workforce optimization can be bought. Workforce optimization is a strategy designed to maximize customer value and satisfaction at the best cost. While strategies are “free,” the cost of their execution is most assuredly not. Every strategy has a cost of execution. Manual executions of WFO strategies have high real costs. Silo solutions have high real costs, too. A WFO infrastructure – tightly integrated – is the transformative engine that enables the center to continue to create greater customer value. To execute a workforce optimization strategy, center management teams need appropriate workforce optimization technology infrastructure to support their efforts.

A workforce optimization infrastructure frees center and enterprise management to manage more effectively and efficiently, develop employees and re-engineer or streamline internal management processes. A step-change in contact center performance occurs through the rigor of a workforce optimization process where:

Contact centers and back-office operations, executing a closed-loop process consisting of these elements, will elevate the skill and knowledge of the workforce, enabling them to do the best possible job on behalf of the customer.

As important as all that is – and make no mistake, it’s vital – workforce optimization is essentially an inward-oriented strategy that focuses upon execution in the contact center to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

According to a recent survey of top executives, managing the customer experience to ensure loyalty and retention is a key component in remaining competitive in troubled economic times. To provide a really great experience is to imply that you already know what your customer truly wants. Do you? Armed with only internal metrics, we have a largely internal view of customer service. And so, workforce optimization has evolved from the basic definition of five years ago.

Two new technologies that are now being incorporated into workforce optimization suite solutions, speech analytics and customer feedback management, are externalizing the contact center and impacting back-office environments. By focusing on the center from the outside-in, leading organizations transform themselves from cost centers to strategic assets in a customer centric enterprise.

Speech analytics is the result of a convergence between computer hardware, sophisticated software and linguistics. Speech analytics solutions for contact centers use techniques commonly referred to as audio mining, where large volumes of recordings are searched and transcribed into text files. Then the text files are indexed, rendering them searchable for key words and phrases as well as surrounding words and phrases.

Speech analytic applications organize the recorded conversations into categories. Categories can be created by the user to research specific issues of interest. The application can also self-suggest categories it notices. Searches for commonalities within a category of recorded calls can reveal probable root cause.

The potential impact of the rigorous and continuous utilization of speech analytics by the contact center is stunning in financial and career terms. For example, a particular insurance company measured its first call resolution rate to be 60%, a number well below their expectations and desires. Speech analytics was used to mine a very large volume of recorded calls. Peering into the 40% of calls where no first call resolution was achieved, the solution identified a high occurrence of calls that contained the phrases “I don’t know,” “I need to check with my supervisor,” “…calling back about my claim,” and “…waiting for a claim form.” The solution further analyzed the calls in each identified category and surfaced some probable root causes for each. The “I don’t know” conversations revealed agent knowledge gaps that could be filled easily with coaching and eLearning knowledge clips. The “I need to check with my supervisor” conversations revealed a lack of agent empowerment embedded in the center’s processes. The “…calling back about my claim” recordings revealed processing issues outside the contact center. As did the remark “…waiting for a claim form.”

With these powerful insights, the insurance company improved its first call resolution by 25% and enjoyed a whole host of ancillary benefits including a reduction in average speed of answer, reduction in average handle time, better staff morale and the avoidance of hiring 22 additional agents.

Soliciting opinions from people in a systematic manner dates back to at least the 19th Century, and probably much earlier. Contact centers have been attempting to survey customers for many years using a number of tactics and techniques. Mailed surveys, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and live telephone conversations — immediately after the transaction or performed some time later via a call-back — are all employed to determine how the customer feels about the interaction with the agent, the company, its products and so on.

The key to high participation rates and successful customer surveying is found in the following:

Workforce optimization is a strategy — the execution of which is quite difficult without enabling technology infrastructure. Synergies are realized through the democratization of functionality once held exclusively inside the functional silos. Roles, responsibilities and support tools are redefined and the process of managing a world-class service delivery network becomes streamlined and more responsive. This is fundamental to becoming customer centric.