The contact center is growing increasingly more complex; employees must work with multiple communication channels and customer touchpoints. Having to manage several vendors for your contact center infrastructure (CCI) and workforce engagement management (WEM) becomes increasingly difficult. And, as technologies evolve, and new generations of employees enter the workforce, you need to rethink tried-and-true methods for employee engagement.

Meeting the Needs of the Next-Gen
Millennials are entrenched in the global workforce — and some are even managers within the contact center. They can’t live without their cell phones, are engaged with their path in life and want tools to help them navigate at work. They want their careers to be fun, but they also want to contribute — and be in control of — their lives. And the majority of this group still feels disengaged from their employers.

But just as we begin to understand one generation of employees, another one rolls in.

Generation Z workers, or iGen as they’re sometimes labeled, turn 24 this year. This generation is 65-million members strong — and will become 40% of all consumers by 2020. They still rely on technology, but they believe there are limitations. And they believe that a good salary is more important than quality of life.

Rethinking Training
Because of this shift in employee dynamics, traditional training methods no longer work to keep employees engaged and excited.

Traditional training cycles, with agents logging out of their computers and joining a standard classroom, aren’t ideal anymore. As business leaders and managers, we must offer training options that fit into new workforce demands. For example, send training to workers’ cell phones or provide more visual or video-based content, instead of PDFs and Q&A documents. Or insert training automatically onto agents’ desktops for them to access when there’s a lull in call volumes.

Real-time data from quality management, operational management, and knowledge management systems create parallel paths for both the customer and employee journeys. However, 49.5% of companies use static knowledge management systems, even though e-learning deployments have doubled and become the training method of choice, according to Dimension Data 2019 Global CX Benchmarking report.

As WEM evolves, it brings with it features like agent training, long-term forecasting and intra-day planning. And it’s easier to use a single vendor and choose the tools you need for your specific business needs.

By interjecting agent performance management tools with operational and quality management data, you can:

  • Analyze and replicate the skills, knowledge, and attributes of top performers, and close the performance gap of your workforce through integrated performance management capabilities
  • Increases speed-to-competency for new and existing employees and improve employee engagement, which provides better customer experiences and reduces costs
  • Give employees customized training, career mapping for future roles and real feedback with the training team
  • Augment skill-based routing with performance tools to ensure customers are passed to the right agent

Hire the right employees based on your specific needs and then train them with customized content using the right learning method. This will make employees feel more engaged. For example, imagine if an employee ends a tough call but then sees a quick 35-second video pop up to prep them for the next call — with additional training interjected over the next several days. Methods like this will empower the employee and prepare him or her for future calls.

Forecasting and Scheduling
Long-term and intra-day forecasting and scheduling are now connected via the same advanced algorithms. These tools use advanced forecasting, optimization and simulation techniques.

For short-term forecasting, workforce management uses an advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-driven, automated forecasting process that auto-detects outliers, performs mathematical fixes for missing data and contains a library of more than 27 state-of-the-art time-series forecasting techniques. The system quickly develops hundreds of thousands of individual forecasts automatically and then returns them with the least amount of errors.

Workforce management has significantly improved the schedule-generation engine. Users are experiencing significantly improved solve times and schedules. Testing has shown that schedules are being developed 10 times faster. And the advanced system combines optimization modeling with simulation modeling to reduce the iterating needed in most scheduling algorithms.

Tune into the on-demand webinar “How to combine customer experience and employee experience to benefit the bottom line” to learn why Pentafon chose a single vendor for CCI and WEM, as well as the tools it needed to meet current business needs. The company will also discuss the process used to switch technologies as well as planned future integrations within a single vendor. The webinar will be presented live for North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Please choose the session that works best for you.