Give Your WFM Supervisor Tools for Success: 3 Challenges Faced by Contact Centers this Year

The complexities of efficiently managing a contact center, and delivering superior customer service, have become significantly more complicated recently. Contact centers face a distributed and remote workforce, a new generation of agents, and rapidly changing operational requirements and digital transformation. This makes the role of a WFM supervisor that much more challenging to overcome these changes. 

Over the past year, contact centers have seen a rapid rise in the volume of calls and the rate of difficult calls that require escalation. In fact, according to a study by Harvard Business Review, during the pandemic, difficult calls increased by an astounding 50-percent overall. At the same time, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that businesses, including contact centers, see employees leaving jobs in record numbers. 

As more customers use digital channels as their primary method of interacting with a company, contact centers require better Workforce Management tools than in the past. Workforce management  (WFM) tools are robust solutions that help businesses streamline contact center operations and combat common day-to-day challenges, allowing them to run more smoothly and effortlessly. Give your WFM supervisor the tools necessary to manage these current challenges with a modern, scalable, and rapidly-deployed WFM solution from Authority Software that enables superior customer service and improves agent job satisfaction.

What is the role of a WFM supervisor?

In a contact center, the Workforce Management (WFM) supervisor is responsible for planning and forecasting, managing resources and optimizing the productivity of employees. The WFM supervisors ensure the right number of agents, with the right skills, are scheduled at the right time.

Challenge #1: Distributed and Remote Workforce

The pandemic forced contact centers to shift to remote work almost overnight due to social distancing requirements. Contact center managers quickly needed to ensure that agents had the right tools and equipment to work remotely. While the pandemic was the catalyst for pushing contact centers to embrace a variety of remote and hybrid working environments, now that the switch has been made, many contact centers will allow employees to continue to work remotely. 

These new work environments present contact center leaders with many challenges, namely poor technology, insufficient connectivity, and difficulty with training. However, businesses are also discovering the advantages of a distributed and remote workforce. Remote operations can help make companies more resilient, prepare for the unexpected, and give them more flexibility, but only if they have the right workforce optimization tools. With Authority Software WFO, businesses can utilize a fully integrated cloud-based solution to accommodate remote workers and virtual contact centers. 

Challenge #2: A New Generation of Agents

Confident and engaged contact center agents are essential to delivering a superior customer experience. Yet, employee attribution and a remote workforce have made recruiting, hiring, and training agents another significant challenge facing contact centers this year. Workforce management tools can help contact centers build the best team of agents and improve employee retention. With easier access to more detailed data, organizations can better predict future workload volumes, calculate the time needed to accomplish specific tasks, and schedule the necessary staff. 

Monitoring tools, in particular, can be used to improve the quality of your customer support and ensure agents are following best practices. However, the ability to monitor agent performance does more than only improve adherence and consistency; it also simplifies performance reviews and makes it easier for hardworking employees to feel like their efforts are being properly recognized. Modern workforce management tools balance the needs of customers, the contact center, and employees, helping increase overall efficiency. 

Challenge #3: Rapidly Changing Operational Requirements and Digital Transformation

Customer demand is a driving force in the digital transformation of contact centers, as today’s customers expect to contact a business from any channel seamlessly. Outdated systems may cause agents to have incomplete or compromised customer data, causing frustration and hindering productivity.

Customers’ expectation of a consistent omnichannel experience has made it increasingly crucial for contact centers to have fully integrated systems, allowing agents to have everything they need in a single, unified desktop. By combining tools and services under one system, suitable contact center solutions help businesses increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction. 

With Authority Software WFO, which includes WFM, quality management, and designer tools, businesses can utilize a fully integrated solution that is agile and flexible to meet the needs of their customers throughout their journey. This type of digital transformation can produce measurable benefits, providing vital data and actionable insights that drive business decisions.

This year, overcome the challenges facing contact centers with a fully integrated, cloud-based workforce optimization solution.

Designed from the ground up, custom workforce optimization tools from Authority Software increase productivity and enable superior service through improved efficiency. Modern workforce optimization software can help businesses increase productivity and profitability and lead them to success.

Learn what’s possible with AI-enabled workforce management.

Key Takeaways

• Contact centers face a distributed and remote workforce, a new generation of agents, and rapidly changing operational requirements and digital transformation. 
• Workforce optimization (WFO) tools are robust solutions that help WFM supervisors combat common day-to-day challenges.
• WFO tools can help businesses increase productivity and profitability and lead them to success.
• With Authority Software WFO, businesses can utilize a fully integrated solution that is agile and flexible to meet the needs of their customers throughout their journey.