If you work in customer service, you've probably been hearing about the importance of the customer journey for years now. With customers having more power than ever before, their experience is paramount to a business's success.

At a contact center, your agents are the ones on the customer experience frontlines - they're the people who determine whether your customers end their interactions with positive, satisfied feelings or negative, dispirited ones.

So don't you want to make sure they have all the tools and insights possible to help them serve your customers better? That's where workforce optimization software, like our Workforce Optimization with Verint Media Recorder, comes in. With a workforce optimization platform, you as a manager are empowered to better manage your agents' scheduling, learning, and more. At the same time, your agents are able to gain the knowledge they need to work better and more efficiently.

How can workforce optimization work for your contact center? Here are a few of the benefits.

Manage workload better with optimized scheduling

Our Verint Media Recorder suite includes Verint Media Recorder Workforce Management, a scheduling and forecasting tool that provides a number of benefits for contact center managers and supervisors. With this software, managers can gain deeper insight into their scheduling practices, optimizing them on a number of levels.

Users can:

• Create a single, centralized schedule that covers the entire network, or individual schedules that each location controls.
• Schedule meetings without disrupting service.
• Maintain regulatory compliance.
• Use skills, work queues, and other criteria to determine scheduling.
• Manage workload scheduling on a long-term or short-term, highly detailed basis.

This can help your contact center reduce overstaffing and overtime, which will in turn help you to cut costs.

Employ quality assurance measures

The Verint Media Recorder suite offers a high-quality platform for recording, evaluating, and archiving calls. Through this smart system, managers can set recording to occur on an on-demand or criteria-driven basis, as well as scheduled.

And the recording system doesn't just record audio - it's a multimedia solution, capturing screens and data from web chats and SMS messaging as well as analog and digital phone systems.

Verint Media Recorder also includes an advanced search feature, allowing you to locate a particular call or type of call at any time. You can even do so from a different location, as call playback, recording scheduling, and system management can all be performed remotely.

What this all means for your contact center is that you have better, easier access to the information you need to improve your agents' performance, resolve any disputes, and reduce your liability.

Gain more time for quality training and agent coaching

With the time you save on scheduling, forecasting, and searching for calls, you have more time available for higher-priority tasks - like agent coaching. One-on-one coaching is still one of the best ways to improve an agent's performance, and too often this important training falls by the wayside because there's simply not enough time for it.

The Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization suite also includes services for performance management and eLearning. With these features, not only are you able to help your agents improve - those agents are empowered to work on their own performance, as well.

This can help you achieve a happier, more satisfied workforce and reduce employee turnover, which at contact centers can be as high as 33 percent annually.

Gain insight from reporting

Perhaps one of the most helpful features of workforce optimization software is the ability to gain actionable insights from extensive reporting abilities. Managers can key performance indicators, or KPIs, as well as scorecards that help identify things like your workforce's areas of strength and weakness, trends, and more.

Armed with this data, managers are able to analyze what's happening in their organizations more easily. Are agents sticking to the script? Are they providing the customer with easy resolutions to their problems? Are customers leaving the interaction happy, angry, or otherwise?

From there, contact center managers are able to make decisions on how and where to improve, disseminate the information easily, and then put their plans into action.

Transitioning to a more customer-centric model assisted by workforce optimization software is not something that can happen overnight - however, its implementation can have major benefits for your workforce, your company, and your bottom line. To learn more about the Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization suite, contact us at KOVA. And if you'd like to learn more about how workforce optimization can help your company, read the whitepaper Workforce Optimization: a Business Process.