What is Contact Center Workforce Optimization?

Contact center workforce optimization is the process of maximizing the quality and efficiency of a contact center's agent team by ensuring they are trained, supported, monitored, motivated and well scheduled. Good agents are a contact center's greatest asset. The service they deliver sets the tone for the customer experience. As with any asset, they need to be managed and developed thoughtfully to enable maximum performance. That's the goal of contact center workforce optimization.

Contact center workforce optimization is often facilitated by a set of technology solutions, which can include:

- Workforce management - Workforce management software performs the critical tasks of forecasting staffing needs and scheduling agents. It helps workforce managers ensure customer demands are met in the most labor-efficient way. This is the heavy lifter of contact center workforce optimization tools.

- Quality monitoring - The monitoring tools of quality management (QM) applications record calls and digital channels, provide a mechanism to assess the quality of the interactions, deliver agent coaching tools, and offer reporting on quality and development results. The best QM solutions also incorporate analytics to increase efficiency and unified agent coaching tools. To increase agent engagement, quality monitoring tools may allow for self-evaluations and agent-accessible reporting.

- Performance management - Performance management systems help develop and engage agents by offering real-time and historical dashboards for instant visibility into performance against KPIs. The information can be made accessible to each employee, from agent to executive, as needed. Performance management also commonly includes gamification and social collaboration functionalities.

Recording – Call recording is considered part of workforce optimization because without this functionality quality management can’t exist. Call recording captures the audio from customer interactions. Screen recording captures agent monitors during the interaction, providing insights related to agent processes in order to amplify coaching beyond the content of the conversation.

Contact center workforce optimization is an ongoing effort, made easier by automation. Contact centers that are committed to workforce optimization processes will experience higher agent engagement, better managed labor costs, and improved customer experience.