Technical system integration is a major pain point for businesses. One of the benefits of PureCloud is the ability to integrate to your existing systems such as CRM, but if your contact center already has an existing workforce management (WFM) system in place, then you’ll want to connect this system as well. Aria Solutions launched a new app on the AppFoundry that does just that.

Here are 3 changes you can enable by taking advantage of this integration:

1. Empower managers to meet service level requirements

Being able to see all customer interactions in one place helps in understanding the customer journey and allows your employees to help customers with their inquiries faster since they have access to all necessary information in one place. But to meet desired service levels managers must also make sure they have the necessary staff to support the volume at different times.

This is where workforce management integration to your PureCloud system comes in.

Integrating the two systems allows them to communicate with each other and for data from your WFM system to flow to PureCloud. Data for times and call volumes gets input into the workforce management system which helps managers maintain service levels.

Managers will continually know how many and who (based on the schedule) should be on the phone to handle the expected volume by taking into account breaks, lunch, meetings, training, offline tasks, and vacations.  They can also tell whether call volume is exceeding the expected volume and whether they need to staff up.

This means managers are more empowered when it comes to being able to meet service expectations and for your business, that means offering better service to your customers.

2. Manage costs by ensuring accurate data is fed to your WFM system

Without having proper WFM integration you might worry that you don’t have enough staff to cover the volume. This guessing game can result in overstaffing and therefore overspending which is why it’s important to ensure you’ve properly integrated your WFM and PureCloud system. If you’re thinking you can rig something up yourself, keep in mind that if you are not feeding accurate data to your WFM system not only can you inadvertently overstaff but you can also overspend. You could unknowingly be spending thousands a day that you don’t need to.

That’s why a productized integration such as Aria’s WFM Adapter for PureCloud is a great solution. You can quickly and easily enable this connection and trust that both systems are properly integrated since this app has been tested and developed by a team with over 20 years WFM integration experience.

3. Improve forecasting with near real-time data

The top two challenges preventing organizations from making use of analytics are “ensuring data quality from a variety of sources” and “accessing data from a variety of sources”.

Companies that can overcome these two challenges can unlock a lot of potential to improve business operations and outcomes.

By not integrating your PureCloud system to WFM, it will be a manual process to feed the WFM system with the volume data from PureCloud. This is not only an added expense for the time spent on data entry but this process is also prone to errors. For example, Aria had a customer that was wasting $10,000 a month in excess agents due to overstaffing!

With the integration, you can also unlock the ability to see near real-time data, which helps managers improve forecasting. They can see the results of their forecasting and adjust it accordingly based on the results to improve staffing overall much quicker than with manual data fed methods.

Integrating your PureCloud platform to workforce management will overall help you run a better business, provide better service, and improve the experience for your customers. Aria’s WFM Adapter for PureCloud supports connection to WFM systems allowing managers to effectively manage the contact center and back office personnel from one powerful tool.

Learn more about the app and integration capabilities by visiting the listing on the AppFoundry.

This blog was co-written by Jarrod Brooks, Product Manager at Aria Solutions.  Jarrod works with customers and developers to deliver high-quality software that provides high business value. To help achieve this he follows technology and growing trends to create a vision for the product and stay ahead of what customers might need now and in the future.