Optimizing Your Workforce Through Shrinkage Management
At its core, Workforce Management (WFM) ensures your business’s understanding of its staffing needs—who’s doing what, what needs doing, how long does it take to do and how many employees are needed at any given time. Broadly speaking, you’re implementing WFM best practices if you’re staffed with the right number of people across each interval and consistently achieving defined goals. One of WFM’s many interlocking factors is shrinkage: the percentage of time that your employees are paid, but are not working on incoming production items. While shrinkage can be valuable (e.g., time spent in training, one-on-one coaching sessions, etc.), excessive shrinkage inhibits productivity, exacerbates stress, and inflates expenses. A proactive and realistic shrinkage forecast mitigates risk and allows you to fully invest in your employees while achieving business goals.
The Key to Motivating: Great Management
The best companies are made up of employees who are both successful and committed. Motivated and engaged employees can be found in a company that promotes productivity, creativity, and innovation through its culture and leadership. Creating a culture that supports and promotes employee engagement requires an understanding of the connection between employee attitudes and performance as well as a leadership team that is accountable for building and strengthening that relationship.
The Value of Data-Driven Insights for Contact Centers
“Thank you for calling. Please listen carefully because our menu has recently changed.” We’ve all heard this greeting, but most callers aren’t aware that it’s not just the menu that has recently changed. The technology, processes, and workforce management efficiencies at contact centers have all undergone recent upgrades. Advanced capabilities are now possible due to data-driven insights which are valuable to contact centers for multiple reasons:
Stay Ahead of the Competition with Customer Journey Mapping
Consider your experiences as a consumer. Have you ever been so aggravated by a company that you’re ready to switch to their competition because they are just too difficult to work with? Most (if not all) of us are likely to answer “yes”.
As consumers with busy schedules and a lot to accomplish on any given day, we gravitate towards options that provide the fastest and most painless way to obtain the services we need – whether it’s making a purchase from an online retailer, or establishing new telecom or cable services, or getting questions answered about healthcare insurance coverage. In every case, we’re looking for a business whose customer service model is simple, effortless, fast and accurate. And what typically aggravates us the most is when a business gives us scripted answers, hard-to-navigate websites and apps, or answers that vary depending on the service channel that we use on any given day.
Big Data Boom: How to Capture and Leverage Insights
If your organization is like most, you might be overwhelmed by the volume of information available at your fingertips. To make it worse, the pace of this information continues to increase; data (lots of it) is being produced more rapidly than ever before. How can you capture this data and use it to help you and your organization make informed decisions, and ideally to predict future behavior and events?
If You are Confused by Corporate Telecom Billing, You are Not Alone
Telecom invoices are very confusing for many consumers. Everyone appreciates the convenience and features that smartphones offer, but understanding charges incurred for voice, data and messaging is another matter. Family plans offer cost savings, but they can also make phone bills more cumbersome and confusing.
Mystery Shopping in the Digital Age
It is every customer experience business leader’s worst nightmare; a customer service representative engaged poorly with a customer, who then recorded the encounter and made it public. In today’s digital landscape, going viral can literally boost or doom your business in a matter of hours. How can companies proactively mitigate their risk to these viral situations in an omni-channel world where customers can reach out via chat, email, phone, or even social media? The answer lies in a quality monitoring tool called Mystery Shopping.
Social Customer Service: 3 Strategies from a Marketer
Achieving a clear line of sight into customer needs and preferences gives companies the ability to make proactive, informed business decisions. Customers want to engage with organizations when and how they prefer and those channel preferences are rapidly evolving. To address these needs, customer experience leaders continue to develop social media as one of those key channels in a successful customer engagement and service strategy. Customers want service on social networks and are reaching out on these channels instead of picking up the phone or using other more traditional methods. In some cases, social media has either evolved into a fully-leveraged customer service engagement channel, or remains in the early stages of adoption by firms. It can also exhibit high levels of ‘activity’ with little cross-channel integration.
Corporate Culture is More Critical Than Ever in the Digital Age
All companies have their own unique corporate cultures. The values and attitudes that are pervasive among a company’s employees, guiding how they respond, make decisions, and ultimately deal with change, develop and evolve over time. In small and mid-sized companies, the culture often stems from a key leader or leaders who set the pace. Whether they realize it or not, the key leaders’ actions, modes of operation, and core values are observed and often repeated by others throughout the organization. In large, complex organizations, the culture is often defined by many factors including years of policies, employee recognition of what behaviors are rewarded and what behaviors are not, and employee perception of what it takes to be successful. Though intangible, corporate culture is a significant factor in all company business decisions and outcomes.
Everyone in the Workplace has a Role in Your Customers’ Experience
Customer experience is top of mind in every organization. Keys to a successful enterprise are centered around realizing the lifetime value of a customer and designing work processes that create customer “delight”, resulting in their likelihood to recommend you to others.
According to our recent customer service experience report, 80% of consumers say they will switch to a different company because of bad customer service, and only half say they would consider returning – the stakes are high!