If you’re involved in managing a call center or customer service-oriented business, you know how important effective workforce management is. You know there’s a big difference between when your staff is working optimally and when it’s not. With the right workforce management tools, you can make the best use of your staff’s time and skills, meeting customer needs quickly without wasting time and resources. Without those tools, however, it can be very challenging to create the most efficient staffing and scheduling. At Versadial, we know how important workforce management is to maximize your use of resources and ultimately deliver the best possible service to your customers. Our call recording software includes a full set of workforce management tools to help you make informed decisions and keep your staff as efficient as possible. In this blog post, you’ll read about the important role of workforce management and how the right tools can help.
Why Is Workforce Management Important?
Workforce management includes all the procedures for staffing, scheduling, predicting customer demand, and adjusting to staffing needs in real time. The goal of ideal workforce management is to have staff with the right resources, in the right place, at the right time, so that they can fulfill customer needs in the most efficient way. When you run a call center, this can be surprisingly complicated. You have to be able to predict when customers will call so that you have staff on hand to answer their calls quickly, without having too many staff who have nothing to do. Workforce management tools help you to create the optimal flow for your organization. It can significantly lower labor costs without lowering performance. In fact, effective workforce management helps employees to do their best work. You can identify and correct inefficiencies and form teams that work well together. Workforce management isn’t just about maximizing resources; it’s about creating a workflow that works seamlessly, with staff who have consistent purpose. That’s a benefit that affects your entire organization and gets passed along to your customers.
Knowledge is Power
The first step to effective workforce management is garnering detailed information that you can act off of. In order to best meet customer needs, you’ll need industry information such as customer demographics, competitor performance, and customer demand. You’ll also need detailed information on what’s going on within the work place. That means insight into employee strengths and weaknesses, time spent on calls, time spent on projects, and customer satisfaction. Ideally, you’ll want this information to be available in real-time so that you can make in-the-moment adjustments. When you’re informed about what’s happening within your organization, you can take steps to optimize performance.
Staff Desktop Assistant
As a standard part of all our Versadial call recording solutions, we’ve created a desktop assistant that enables your staff to inform management of what they’re doing. Right on their desktop, staff members can indicate whether they are on a call, on a break, working on a project, or on the floor. The system will track their total number of calls, as well as the time they spend on each kind of task. This information can be relayed in real time to management, providing a detailed picture of staff activity. Staff will also be able to view their statistics in order to monitor their own performance.
Business Intelligence Reports for Management
All of the information from employees’ desktop assistants is brought together in a management dashboard. On this dashboard, you can quickly view how many employees are on a call, on break, or working on a project. This provides you with a real-time snapshot of employee activity. You can also divide employees by department or team in order to compare performance across your organization. This in-the-moment information is exactly what you need in order to create effective, responsive management. Versadial’s software also produces detailed reports of staff and customer activity. Using these reports, you can track your busy and off-peak times, enabling you to make informed decisions about staffing and scheduling. Remember, of course, that this detailed information is only as helpful as the use you make of it. It’s important to review these reports regularly to look for shifts in trends and performance. Responding to these changes promptly will ensure that your efficiency doesn’t lag.
Takeaways
The biggest lesson of workforce management is the importance of making informed decisions. Staffing and scheduling decisions shouldn’t be based on generalized ideas about the industry, but on detailed and recent statistics from your own organization. When you act on data about employee performance and customer satisfaction, you have the opportunity to improve your business optimization in both big and small ways. Remember that it’s worthwhile to respond to changes of all sizes. Having information in real time enables you to make small tweaks to your daily staffing that will keep your business efficient around the clock. With the right information and insightful planning, you can produce enviable efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Last Updated on February 4, 2019