Many contact centre organisations pride themselves for their ‘employees 1st strategy’. I am sure you have heard the phrase ‘happy agents make happy customers’.
This sounds very logical of course. When your customers contact you, your agents are the most critical part of the customer experience equation. At that very moment your people talk to your customers, they can make or break your brand.
There are many things that have impact on how your people feel, if they are truly engaged with your organisation, but most important, engaged with your customers.
Employee Engagement in the contact centre depends on things like the accessibility of the building, the quality of the chair they sit in, the headset they wear and the applications and systems you provide them with to do their work.
Another element in the day to day life of a contact centre agent is their schedule.
To deliver on your service level objectives and ensure there is always someone available to pick up the phone or respond to that email, ensuring you have the right coverage is critical. However, the workforce schedule has enormous impact on your agents, that goes way beyond when they must start their day or take their 1st break.
Next to delivering great customer experiences, your agents have a personal life. Every day they try to balance their jobs with their social activities, raising their children and manage their precious time.
But unlike your call volume arrival pattern, their lives are probably a bit harder to forecast and or ‘social opportunities’ always come up last minute.
Allowing your agents to have influence on their schedule, will greatly help you increase employee engagement and many workforce management applications have some form of ‘agent self service capability’ where agents can see their schedule or request a day off.
However, almost all the time this option is not available outside the contact centre. And guess where those social opportunities often arise? Right! When your agents are not at work.
What if you could expose workforce schedule functionality outside the walls of the contact centre? Using a device that probably the entire workforce already has?
A modern and forward thinking contact centre manager should offer a mobile workforce management application to his or her workforce. With such an application, your agents can:
Such an application will be greatly appreciated by your agents, but there are many benefits for operations team as well. Managing all the day to day changes like preferences, sick notices and change in preference is no longer a manual process, but can be processes much easier, faster and cheaper.
To learn more about the komyunity mobile workforce management application, visit www.komyunity.com and download our free ebook today.
29 March 2017
