In the digital age, workforce management (WFM) has become a pivotal piece of business success, particularly in the contact center. Traditionally, WFM relied on manual processes and outdated tools that were both time-consuming and inefficient. Today, with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies, businesses can transform how they manage their workforce. This allows for more strategic decision-making and efficient scheduling. Plus, it improves employee engagement.

Building and managing a high-performing workforce in an increasingly digital world can be challenging — but not impossible. When tools and capabilities are seamlessly connected, businesses are fully equipped for success. And they’re ready to effectively execute workforce planning, control costs, and ensure employee and customer satisfaction.

Meet Expectations with Workforce Management Tools

Businesses need to ensure that customers can connect with them anytime, anywhere, through their channel of choice, to achieve an excellent customer experience, generate value and grow the business.

With the rise of omnichannel communication, contact centers must handle every integration with quality while protecting privacy. And they need to adhere to laws and regulations — all without increasing operating costs.

In addition, the contact center is a challenging work environment characterized by absenteeism, high turnover rates, ineffective procedures, repetitive tasks, and complicated tools and processes. Contact center managers are often faced with ensuring service provisioning — and must secure a highly trained and multiskilled digital workforce.

Add to that shifting employee expectations. In recent years, employees expect more flexibility in their schedules — and they want to develop skills and experience professional growth.

According to the Genesys report, “Human values: The operating system for a high-performing contact center,” learning new skills (38%) and new technologies (23%) are what high-performing agents globally say they enjoy most about working in a contact center.

With this new workforce paradigm, the status quo is under pressure. Traditional call center workforce management software is no longer valid.

Companies need to be confident that they can scale, as needed, with the properly skilled workforce to retain staff, decrease burnout and, ultimately, efficiently meet customer expectations.

AI-Driven Solutions for Workforce Management

AI-driven solutions, such as those offered by Genesys Cloud™ Workforce Engagement Management (WEM), transform traditional WFM software in the call center into a more streamlined, data-driven process. These tools automate many of the manual tasks associated with forecasting and scheduling, providing businesses with the flexibility needed to meet the demands of a changing workforce.

For example, Genesys Cloud WEM integrates AI to improve forecasting and scheduling by analyzing real-time data and predicting future needs. This helps planners and schedulers create more accurate and efficient staffing models.

By automatically adjusting for real-time changes, such as unexpected absences or surges in customer interactions, AI ensures businesses can maintain service-level agreements (SLAs) without the need for constant manual adjustments.

Here are four ways that developing a modern, omnichannel workforce management (WFM) planning strategy benefits your teams and your contact center.

1. Improve the Customer Experience

Improving customer experience (CX) is a critical part of any business strategy. From a tactical perspective, this is where you meet SLAs and performance KPIs across touchpoints and channels. To achieve this, organizations need to have the right people with the right skills to handle interactions — at the right times.

Connecting Customers and Agents

Modern contact centers have outgrown traditional, manually built skill- and queue-based routing methods. Misrouted interactions increase unplanned overtime costs, the number of call transfers and average handle times.

However, it’s critical to have a workforce management solution that’s integrated into the cloud-based contact center platform. It should include a routing engine that allows managers to consult agent schedules in real time — and adjust according to availability, skills and channels.

This allows you to optimize schedules. Interactions won’t be routed to employees who aren’t scheduled or who aren’t prepared to address specific inquiries through a determined channel.

That saves on unplanned overtime and labor costs. By having the right skills and proper training, employees have enough time to complete the task within the established time.

2. Leverage Analytics and Reporting to Enhance Management

Advanced analytics and reporting are another key to effective workforce management. AI-powered solutions provide managers with real-time insights into agent performance, staffing needs, and customer interaction patterns.

Boost Efficiency and Your Bottom Line

Plan and execute employee experience (EX) and routing strategies using AI-powered processes for automated workflows. With these you can connect customer history and needs with real-time and historic interaction data.

With AI, businesses can analyze historical and real-time data to improve operational efficiency. For example, predictive analytics helps forecast peak interaction times, allowing businesses to adjust staffing levels accordingly and avoid unnecessary overtime.

By analyzing KPIs, such as average handling time, customer satisfaction scores and adherence, managers can identify areas for improvement. Then they can implement strategies that boost productivity and reduce costs.

AI-driven workforce management solutions also provide actionable insights that enable managers to make informed decisions quickly, ensuring that the contact center is always operating at peak efficiency.

These tools deliver true flexibility to answer workforce needs and accurately optimize agent time across channels. This means employees efficiently respond to customer inquiries and can more easily handle everyday variability.

3. Reduce Burnout and Attrition

Increasing employee engagement and satisfaction and reducing employee turnover are critically important. Ensuring employees receive the right training and are connected to the proper customer can relieve stress. Providing ongoing opportunities for skills and productivity improvements keeps employees motivated and engaged.

Preventing burnout or general dissatisfaction is less expensive than attrition — and it’s less disruptive to customers. With the right tools, businesses can offer employees the flexibility and growth opportunities they want — without impacting customer support goals.

Engage Employees and Make Their Work Easy

To reduce technology fatigue, employees need access to an easy-to-use tool to manage interactions, schedules and development. This also can be a big time-saver — especially if done through an integrated, agent-oriented solution.

Giving employees a tool to easily manage any interaction type and adding coaching functionalities that support their work makes them feel more engaged in their daily tasks. And businesses can maintain consistency, retain employees and meet organizational objectives.

Providing clarity on various assigned activities helps employees find the right balance between tasks and business objectives. It gives them the flexibility they want. And it offers them the ability to manage their schedules and submit time-off requests.

And, when these capabilities are combined with a set of tools for employee development, organizations empower employees to reach their full potential.

In addition, by viewing schedules on their mobile devices, employees can communicate any issues while on the go. This allows supervisors to respond timely to changes without affecting customers or employees.

Build an Omnichannel Digital Strategy

As competitive pressures and customer demands increase, it’s critical to modernize your call center workforce management strategy so your team can continue to meet these increasing demands.

You need to build an experience that’s true to your business across each channel, catering to the specific audiences that want to interact with you on each one. With cloud-based call center forecasting software, you can more easily manage staffing levels to reduce unnecessary overtime.

Employees will only receive work if they have time to complete it. And reducing misrouted interactions and work items relieves employee stress.

In addition, companies need to consider the new work paradigm and the variety in the workforce, regardless of location or generational working styles. Remote and hybrid work are quickly becoming the new normal for organizations of all sizes. And a robust WEM tool enables supervisors to navigate a team that’s spread across a city, country or world.

4. Lower Costs

Driving operational efficiency is a consistent goal of any well-run contact center. Through integration and automation, businesses can centralize control, reduce costs, and enable processes and employees to be more efficient.

Simplicity, Accuracy and Consistency

Executing skills and schedule updates in one place can dramatically reduce the time and costs associated with manually making daily changes. In addition, organizations have a wealth of accessible data when channels, WEM systems and routing engines are built to work together.

From a more technical standpoint, an all-in-one solution unifies the administration of users and skills while providing a single source of cross-channel insight into staff and business performance metrics. The automated use of historical data makes it possible to have greater accuracy in omnichannel forecasting.

That ensures workforce planning happens at the right levels across channels and time. Managers can also define service levels based on business rules and gather required statistics for all channels automatically.

Guarantee Adherence Across Channels and Work

It’s important to ensure employees are doing what they’re supposed to be doing when they’re supposed to be doing it. Using an integrated Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), routing and WEM solution allows supervisors to “nudge” employee behaviors toward business goals.

Having an all-in-one solution provides schedule-based routing, which means task transitions are managed automatically. The management team controls task distribution logic on the same platform where agents handle the customer interactions.

Furthermore, by connecting schedules, interactions and performance information that’s gamified, ongoing two-way communication is enabled and simplified. This gives supervisors and employees real-time access metrics such as adherence, average handle time and transfer ratio metrics.

With contact center workforce optimization software, employees are empowered across job roles, providing visibility into what they should be doing and taking control and responsibility for their actions. They get consolidated insights about performance and actionable recommendations to improve and excel at their jobs.

Build a Smarter Business with a Workforce Engagement Management Suite

Our increasingly digital world presents plenty of challenges.

AI-driven workforce management software provides businesses with real-time data on customer interactions, staffing needs and agent performance. This allows for immediate adjustments to schedules, interaction routing and staffing levels to ensure that customers always receive prompt, efficient service.

By using real-time data, contact centers can reduce wait times, resolve customer inquiries faster and improve overall customer satisfaction. In addition, real-time data provides agents with up-to-date information on customer preferences, which improves their performance and enables them to deliver more personalized service.

Improve customer experiences, enhance employee experiences and grow your business. To learn more, read “A practical guide to modern workforce engagement” and get insights into how to give your contact center employees the tools and skills they need to succeed.