Andrew Molacek Talks Workforce Optimization

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For those of us in the contact center industry we have always known that contact centers are where real people have real conversations that have real impact. Brand reputation can be saved, squandered or skyrocket as a result of a contact center interaction. And workforce optimization could help you make more positive outcomes.

After meeting with Andrew Molacek of Calabrio at Call Center Week Winter I decided to revisit their Workforce Optimization solutions. It’s been several year’s since my last review and a lot has changed since then.

Calabrio has become a market leader in the way other technology developers could take lessons from. More than two-thirds of their new product development comes directly from customer feedback. They have led customer experience in a customer experience focused industry. This is how it should be.

As a result Calabrio has accumulated significantly more new customers and numerous industry awards. Their expansion has meant an increase in both solution offerings (beyond workforce optimization) and job opportunities as companies seek to attain real improvements leveraging the insight and relationship building power of contact center.

Watch Andrew Molacek of Calabrio talk workforce optimization at Call Center Week Winter with Jim Rembach Click to Tweet

What Calabrio Does

Calabrio is a customer engagement software company that provides analytic insights to catalyze growth through customer service contact centers. The Calabrio ONE® software suite empowers everyone in an organization, from contact center agents to the CEO, with easy-to-use tools that provide a better understanding of the customer. Every customer interaction yields insights that expand customer-consciousness, which is how leading companies now drive growth and long-term corporate prosperity. Source: http://calabrio.com/

Optimizing Workforce Optimization

Compliance and quality monitoring has grown into more than merely generating a performance score for something that happened in the past. Workforce Optimization solutions have taken a leap and deliver more value when you change your timforame to real-time and even the future.

In an article titled, Workforce Optimization Undergoes Radical Change – Ready? – Richard Snow of Ventana Research shares that workforce optimization applications now have a number of potential game changers.

The first is analytics. Participants in their next-generation customer engagement research said it will have the greatest impact of any application on customer and employee satisfaction.

Advanced speech and text analytics, used in combination with structured data analytics, can produce a comprehensive view of interaction handling, employee performance and customer satisfaction. It can spot trends and issues, and predict likely outcomes of future interactions.

Instead of now analyzing past performance this information can be used to better forecast the future. You can gain greater insight into resource requirements, process changes, uncover and determine training and coaching needs, and automate calculation of metrics focused on both customers and employees.

These may include metrics such as first-contact-resolution rates across channels, customer effort scores, customer lifetime value and agent performance. Snow also shares that these metrics can become an integral part of gamification techniques that track and reward agents for performance in day-to-day operations and for taking part in training, coaching and game-playing sessions to help improve skills.

Does your Quality have Impact?

Optimizing quality requires an intermix and balance of internal and external quality. The customer experience can never be one sided. As a company you have needs. But can you evoke the customer to serve your needs. Forcing customers never works.

In order for quality to provide high impact and ROI you have to optimize your workforce. To do it you must operate in a framework that helps you to maintain balance (internal and external) and direct change.

In an article Wow Customer Experiences from Contact Center Quality you get introduced to the Impact Quality Assurance (iQA) model. This model focuses on moving insight from internal quality and external quality to metrics and action. You also learn about the 4 Vital Questions of Contact Center Quality developed by Dr. Cliff Hurst of Westminster College.

This model is important because most organizations fail in the execution phase of optimization. And positive change (action) has to be accomplished for you to experience positive ROI.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Jim Rembach
Jim Rembach is recognized as a Top 50 Thought Leader and CX Influencer. He's a certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner and host of the Fast Leader Show podcast and president of Call Center Coach, the world's only virtual blended learning academy for contact center supervisors and emerging supervisors. He’s a founding member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association’s CX Expert Panel, Advisory Board Member for Customer Value Creation International (CVCI), and Advisory Board Member for CX University.

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