What does Workforce Optimization (WFO) mean?
Workforce Optimization is a suite that encompasses different operational aspects that affect business growth. It includes various contact center technologies like:
- Workforce management
- Quality management
- Interaction analytics
- Performance dashboards
- Gamification (adding gaming elements to processes)
What is WFO's role in a contact center?
Why is workforce optimization
important in contact centers?
Through an effective WFO solution, your contact center can:
Reduce operational costs
Use AI-driven scheduling to maximize coverage to reduce long hold times and call abandonment while minimizing agent idle time.
Improve customer experience
From your past customer interactions, you'll be able to communicate better. You can achieve this not only through finding opportunities to improve employee performance but also seeing how other aspects of your contact center, like proper employee scheduling, can increase customer satisfaction.
Boost agent engagement
Agent turnover is a challenge many contact center leaders face each day. WFO helps keep your agents engaged and motivated to perform better. Happy agents lead to happy customers.
Enhance contact center operations
WFO provides detailed insights for you to monitor, understand, and proactively address customer needs. From identifying customer sentiment to the top areas of frustration, WFO can help you make better decisions.
How does WFO work?
WFO is more of a platform for business strategy than actual software. So there may not be a singular answer to this question. Businesses can go about it in different ways, depending on how they operate, their customer behavior, the location of their operations, and many other factors.
However, there are certain essential components that most, if not all, contact center solutions use to build their WFO platform.
What is workforce management?
- Answering inbound calls and messages within a consistent time frame
- Providing the same level of expertise on every call as much as possible
What to look for in workforce management
What is quality management (QM)?
What to look for in a quality management platform
What is interaction analytics?
What to look for in interaction analytics
What is performance management?
What to look for in a performance management solution
How is WFO deployed?
For example:
- While providers were responsible for software support, your company still needed to manage and maintain the hardware and infrastructure
- If you had multiple contact centers, you also needed separate infrastructure for each location
- The costs of maintaining, managing, troubleshooting, and everything else fell in your organization's bucket