UNI 5.1.3 MALECON Nº 3.

Use now, no plans to replace/upgrade Use now, looking to replace/upgrade Will implement within 12 months Will implement after 12 months No plans to implement

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Respondents were asked to score the importance of various workforce and performance management issues out of 10. Results are shown below for the whole industry, and just for larger contact centers. (Only the scoring extremes of ‘very unimportant’ at 1 or 2/10, and ‘very important’ at 9 or 10/10 are shown, in order to demonstrate the pattern of people who feel very strongly one way or the other).

Figure 81: Workforce and performance management-related issues and improvements

Figure 82: Workforce and performance management-related issues and improvements

11% 3% 18% 12% 12% 4% 6% 6% 10% 7% 3% 8% 3% 8% 6% 15% 10% 13% 11% 12% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Under/overstaffing

Identifying an agent's specific areas of improvement Understanding why customers call the contact center Handling multichannel interactions more effectively and efficiently Aligning the enterprise's goals with agents' behavior

Workforce and performance management-related issues and improvements

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 13% 4% 17% 13% 9% 4% 4% 4% 9% 13% 4% 17% 13% 17% 17% 26% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Under/overstaffing

Identifying an agent's specific areas of improvement Understanding why customers call the contact center Handling multichannel interactions more effectively and efficiently Aligning the enterprise's goals with agents' behavior

Workforce and performance management-related issues and improvements (large contact centers)

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Perhaps the biggest discrepancy between the industry-wide results and those simply for large contact centers was the finding that bigger operations are much more likely to be aware that there can be a disconnect between how an agent behaves and how the company wishes to be seen. For example, an agent can be encouraged to finish a call quickly (and rewarded for it), which is good for the contact center’s metrics, but which may make the customer feel rushed and less valued, going against what’s best for the company. Understanding where the potential gaps are will allow scheduling and forecasting to take place that looks beyond simple efficiency, and which measures the quality of the call in the context of the company’s goals.

The ability to forecast and schedule agents to handle non-voice work to an acceptable service level, while retaining their services for voice work as and when needed is seen as far more important for larger contact centers as well.

The reasons that customers are calling is not seen as being a particularly important opportunity for improvement amongst most respondents. In our view, this is an area which is ripe for further

investigation, with tools such as interaction analytics offering the chance for businesses to understand their customers better, as well as being able to identify the purpose of the contact center, and where the costs of running an operation are actually being spent.

The identification of areas for improvement at an agent level was seen as an important area for improvement - especially with larger contact centers - with tools such as performance management, speech analytics and quality monitoring identifying each agent’s training needs, matched with an understanding of the types of call that come into the contact center.

Excessive agent idle time and/or understaffing is seen as a major issue by 17% of large contact centers, against a similar figure of 15% industry-wide.

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This year's workforce management chapter focuses on how systems can be improved, and the functionality that contact centers believe that they will need in order to manage non-traditional

interactions, such as new channels or staff who are not based in the contact center, but who may speak with customers (e.g. branch or field staff). With 10-15% of inbound interactions being email for many organizations, and 25%+ of contact centers stating that customers speak with knowledge-workers elsewhere in the business, it is no longer enough for a workforce management system to forecast and schedule based only on voice calls taken by the contact center.

Figure 83: Which changes to your workforce management systems would benefit you most?

It might be thought that as workforce management is most useful for businesses with hundreds of agents, where relatively small efficiencies in forecasting and scheduling can make a huge difference to performance and cost, that it would be these larger operations which most want multichannel

capabilities. In fact, the advent of social media contact, the rise in web chat and the jump in email volumes across the board mean that around half of respondents from all of the size bands consider multichannel and voice scheduling to be of great importance to them.

Almost half of respondents would find easier scheduling of great value to them, with only 10% stating this will provide little extra value to them.

49% 47% 36% 30% 27% 34% 43% 39% 31% 21% 17% 10% 25% 39% 52% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Combining multichannel and voice traffic scheduling Reducing the effort / headcount needed to schedule intra-day changes to schedules Enabling better homeworking Employee self-scheduling

Which changes to your workforce management systems would benefit you most?

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The ability to alter a schedule within the course of a working day will be seen to have great benefit by 36% of respondents, with those from medium and large operations understandably more enthusiastic about this capability.

Of secondary importance to many respondents in small and medium operations is the ability to allow agents to self-schedule (although this can be very good for morale), with homeworking being far more important to those respondents that actually carry out this activity, of course. 58% of respondents from larger operations thought that self-scheduling would be of great benefit to them.

55% of respondents from large contact centers use a combined voice and multimedia workforce management application, with small minorities using an ad-hoc approach or separate scheduling.

Figure 84: Scheduling of multichannel workforce activity, by contact center size

Respondents were asked to comment upon those features which are most important within their workforce management solutions. As before, focus is placed on those respondents who feel most strongly about issues, whether negative or positive.

The most obvious finding from this chart is that reporting functionality is seen as the key to successful workforce management, closely followed by its usability. These elements are perhaps the most fundamental in any workforce management solution, and shows that despite the changing nature of customer contact, the basics still apply.

9% _6% 9% 8% 50% 29% 9% 32% 22% 32% 55% 34% 19% 32% 27% 26% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Small Medium Large Average