Delivering remarkable customer experiences requires many critical components, but the human element is the true driving force. It’s common knowledge that happy employees provide better service — and they create more revenue for an organisation’s bottom line.

In fact, businesses with happy, engaged employees are 4.2 times more profitable and more likely to appear in the American customer satisfaction index. That’s why it’s critical for organisations to focus on their employees. And, that’s why we’re doubling down on workforce engagement management (WEM) at Genesys.

With our new business unit, Employee Engagement Solutions, we’re pushing our WEM solutions even further. We’re hitting the gas and setting our sights on disrupting the industry with WEM capabilities that are born in the cloud and now embedded directly within the Genesys Cloud™ platform. With faster innovation cycles, businesses can adopt new features at cloud pace and enable their contact centres to go beyond simply focusing on agent productivity and performance to provide personalised and empathetic customer experiences.

WEM for Today and Tomorrow

This is more important now than it’s ever been – especially as COVID-19 continues to rear its ugly head. People want reassurance. Consumers want the human touch when they need confirmation that their flight has been cancelled or their package has shipped. Contact centre employees want encouragement that it’s OK to work an eight-hour shift, split across two- and three-hour stints so they can juggle their many other priorities. Businesses need confidence they have the right tools to appropriately schedule employees in the new normal while also ensuring they’re engaged even when physically disconnected.

The fact is, it’s a completely different ball game. And yesterday’s WEM simply isn’t enough. It’s time to stop building features for paradigms from the past. Businesses operate differently now — and Genesys understands that. Managers can no longer monitor and coach employees by sitting next to them or walking around to guide their interactions in person. Remote monitoring often only gives them hard data on employee productivity; it doesn’t take into account actual engagement and skills, such as the ability to truly show customers that they understand the situation they need help addressing.

New Tools for a New Workforce

If COVID-19 has done anything for us, it’s opened up businesses to new possibilities. While the pandemic isn’t the reason to be disruptive – it’s accelerating adoption and prioritising empathy as we interact with one another. It’s time for the next generation of WEM tools that will enable businesses to focus on factors like increasing consumer trust, making sure agents are using empathy appropriately — and providing employee and customer experiences that exceed their expectations.

We still need to measure performance with traditional methods: service level, average handle time, average time to answer. But these new KPIs are the ones you want to measure your agents against. That’s what we’re bringing to market now and what’s helping to inform our roadmap.

Today, Genesys Workforce Engagement Management integrates the customer journey with data and the human element in a next-generation cloud platform so organisations can deliver true personalisation. It’s an inherent piece of Experience as a ServiceSM, enabling contact centres to combine human interactions with automated capabilities so employees can show customers empathy and resolve simple inquiries with speed and ease.

The next phase of WEM is going to look much different — and Genesys is driving that change. We already have robust features and capabilities like interaction recording, automated forecasting and scheduling, collaboration tools, artificial intelligence (AI)-based training and workforce planning, as well as gamification that are all built from the cloud. But that’s just the beginning. We’re helping businesses give employees an integrated, seamless experience so they can improve the service they deliver.

We’re at a pivotal moment when the workforce and even entire organisations have been disrupted. Organisations need an equally disruptive technology to overcome today’s challenges, so they’re poised for whatever the future brings. With Genesys Workforce Engagement Management, businesses can truly put their employees first to yield the ultimate payoff: improved customer experiences that foster trust and loyalty.

To learn more ways to engage your contact centre team for better customer experiences, read this Frost & Sullivan whitepaper.