Workforce optimization (WFO) comprises tightly integrated solutions, business processes, and other contact center technologies that aim to optimize and maximize employee productivity, efficiency, and engagement.

Workforce optimization (WFO) cannot be a standalone solution. Rather, it is a unified and advanced tech ecosystem ensuring that every area of your contact center works together to achieve amazing outcomes. It includes:

• Workforce management
• Quality management
• Interaction analytics
• Performance management and gamification

A comprehensive, easy-to-use WFO suite, like RingCentral WFO, is tightly unified with other contact center technologies—such as automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), artificial intelligence (AI), pre-built integrations, omnichannel, speech and text recognition, and more—to provide exceptional customer experience without needing to use multiple vendors. This integrated contact center solution provides accurate forecasting and scheduling, AI-powered agent assistance, objective evaluation and feedback, customized coaching, and performance recognition and awards to motivate and retain the workforce while ensuring peak productivity, smarter customer experiences, and reduced costs.

Managing contact centers is tedious as you try to reduce long wait times, the number of dropped calls, counts of dissatisfied customers, and so on. It would help if you had an engaged and empowered workforce to help you accomplish your goals. With a WFO solution like RingCentral, you will have all the tools you need to ensure your agents are at their best.

What this means for your contact center is an opportunity to improve customer journeys through better agent interactions, AI-assisted workflows and processes, and more efficient transactions.

Workforce management (WFM) consists of integral management tools that can be used to supervise in-office and remote workers. It can be utilized to build agent schedules, plan time offs, manage timelines and timesheets, and empower agents by making life easier for them while maximizing their skill sets to increase productivity.

In the past, contact center agents could be assigned to billing, customer service, directory assistance, or technical support, but only a few could handle more than one or two types of calls. This gave human resources an easier time as they just needed to consider when different types of calls come in and schedule most of their qualified agents on those shifts.

Contact centers have evolved since then. Today’s agents are able to handle multiple types of issues and provide support across various digital and non-digital channels, especially with the rise of omnichannel contact centers. Fortunately, there are WFM tools that can be used to understand agent skills and customer behavior:

1. Forecasting tools. The ability to manage your data is critical. Your WFM should include the ability to accurately forecast based on historical data.
2. Skills-based scheduling feature. With agents having multiple skills, you must be able to assign them to a schedule that will maximize these skills while decreasing the chances that they’ll receive calls they’re not equipped to handle. Having a tool that defines your agents’ skills is critical to proper scheduling.
3. Real-time adherence reports. What is the use of proper scheduling when your agents are not following it? Get a WFM solution with a robust, real-time adherence tracking feature for time and attendance to hold your agents accountable.
4. Trading shifts feature. There will be times when your planned schedule will conflict with the plans of your agents. Give your workforce the flexibility of being able to trade shifts with people who share the same skill set.

Quality management software refers to the set of tools used in contact centers that help the quality assurance (QA) team review and monitor interactions by agents to ensure that each call is up to the standards expected from the company. This solution is essential in providing consistent-quality product and service levels in your contact centers.

A good quality monitoring and management platform equips your QA team with tools to help them review the quality of actual calls and provide the proper feedback and coaching. It not only corrects agent mistakes but also dramatically improves agent performance. Some of the features that you need in a good QM platform include:

1. Screen and call recording. By recording calls and screen activity, agent performance can be accurately reviewed. These files are also a great way for QM and QA teams to determine whether or not the right procedures are followed during interactions, such as informing customers that calls are being recorded, entering the correct information, and providing supplementary notes for other agents.
2. Customizable review forms. Your quality assurance team uses evaluation forms to review the work of your agents. QA scorecards and other data are used to create a report that determines how well agents do during calls. You want these forms to be customizable because the way you evaluate agents will inevitably evolve as better tools and technology emerge.
3. Easy-to-use AI-powered interface. The ideal QM platform is one that allows your team to quickly identify the agents they want to monitor or review, the inbound calls they want to listen to, and the corresponding review form that needs to be used.

Interaction analytics is the technology that lets you identify keywords during voice and non-voice customer interactions: SMS messaging, live chat, email, social media, and more. This also covers complaints and compliments submitted by customers.

Analyzing customer and agent interactions is helpful in discerning disposition, identifying opportunities, mitigating risk, and making better decisions based on data.

Your interaction analytics platform should be flexible enough to keep pace with day-to-day operations growing more complex than ever. Some of the essential functions you need to future-proof your organization are:

1. Speech analytics. It refers to the process of analyzing recorded voice calls to gather information. It works by identifying keywords derived from the voice of the customer and the agent.
2. Text analytics. This follows the same concept as speech analytics, except this one focuses on non-voice conversations with customers through alternative channels like live chat, SMS, email, and social media.
3. Desktop analytics. It complements both speech and text analytics. What happens is that it correlates the findings from the interactions with customers through voice and non-voice channels with the activity on the desktop or the agent interface. It allows the contact center to see if their agents’ actions match what they say to customers.

Performance management dashboards are indicator panels that communicate the organization's objectives and allow people to measure, monitor, and manage critical aspects and processes needed to achieve those goals.

Real-time and live dashboards provide a comprehensive view of operations across all channels in order to assist teams into making data-driven business decisions.

What you want in a performance management dashboard is the ability to combine call data, KPIs, and other contact statistics with other aspects of the contact center. It includes customer accounts, customer relationship management (CRM) software, or other back-end data that will give actionable insights into how your operations impact your revenue.

1. Automated data collection. Automation means that the latest information is always available when needed. It allows for faster, AI-generated reporting and analysis while reducing mistakes and errors commonly associated with manual data extraction.
2. Integrations. Not only do you want your data ready and available, but you also want the ability to integrate data from different sources. That is why closed-off environments are a thing of the past; you want it easily integrated through open APIs.
3. Enterprise-wide capability. Look at the bigger picture and opt for business intelligence and reporting solutions that extend their capabilities to other use cases within the organization, not just your call center.

Gamification is an aspect of workforce optimization that adds gaming elements to certain aspects of the business. While organizations typically use gamification for customer engagement initiatives, it can also be used to improve employee engagement. It is a great way to create a more positive workplace culture for team members, whether they be back-office staff or front-facing employees.

Working in a call center is challenging. There’s a lot of pressure to perform, and your interactions with customers are not always positive. Gamification aims to alleviate some of that stress by providing ways to boost morale and improve workforce engagement.

Gamification can be approached in many ways, but some of the most common in the contact center setup include:

1. Badges and ribbons. You can create a tier of achievements where agents can earn badges by reaching each tier. These badges or ribbons are virtual representations of their accomplishments and the organization’s recognition of those same accomplishments.
2. Points and rewards. You can create a reward system where agents can earn points for specific tasks and exchange them for actual prizes.
3. Challenges. Agents can compete for top rank on specific performance metrics like who has the best call handle time, who can get the most feedback from customer surveys, or who has the best QA metrics overall.

Like most call center-related technologies, on-premise setups used to be the only option for the deployment of WFO solutions. Organizations had to come up with their hardware to support the IT infrastructure hosting the service. This setup has led to some problems for businesses. For example:

• While providers are responsible for software support, your company still needs to manage and maintain the hardware and infrastructure.
• You’ll also need separate infrastructure for each location if you have multiple contact centers.
• The labor costs of maintaining, managing, troubleshooting, and everything else fall in your organization’s bucket.

Cloud technology, however, has drastically improved how workforce optimization solutions are deployed. For instance, RingCentral deploys an all-in-one WFO suite powered by artificial intelligence within our cloud contact center solutions. This means we handle all maintenance and hardware costs (including actual infrastructure). That’s on top of handling software upgrades and updates as well.

Leaving your WFO needs to a provider like RingCentral means your company can focus on using the suite instead of spending your time and money maintaining the infrastructure that supports it.

The average contact center manages about 20 different vendors for different aspects of their contact centers—from analytics, business intelligence, workforce scheduling, and the list goes on. That's a lot of vendors to monitor. The next thing you know, your contact center management's time is spent managing these vendor relationships instead of looking for opportunities to optimize your operations.

When you power your contact center with RingCentral, you'll get a full breadth of capabilities rolled into a singular platform. From telephony and call routing functions to collaboration and analytics, you can do it all. You can rest assured that you're not compromising on any capabilities for your contact center just because you're sticking to one vendor. RingCentral has market-leading and AI-enabled tools included in our workforce optimization suite combined with an omnichannel contact center solution.

Talk to our team to see how our product works or to learn more about our plans and pricing. We are excited to hear from you soon!