Workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions go beyond the traditional scheduling, forecasting, management, and reporting capabilities of workforce management (WFM) applications to focus on the broader aspects of employee engagement, satisfaction, and development.
Although employee engagement was once seen as a nice-to-have in the contact center, it has a real impact on the bottom line in the following areas:
- Improved employee retention. WEM capabilities, such as targeted coaching and training, data-driven performance dashboards, and gamification and rewards programs, can help reduce burnout and increase agent retention and reduce recruiting, onboarding, and training costs.
- Improved interaction quality. WEM enable managers to use interaction data to improve performance and quality on an ongoing basis, helping them to identify performance trends that can negatively impact customer experience (CX) and their root causes.
- Reduced costs. Intelligent WEM can take some of the burden of balancing service-level requirements and staffing off managers by providing them with intelligent forecasting and enabling them to ensure staffing levels while keeping costs down.
With those benefits in mind, here are some key trends to consider when evaluating your WEM strategy:
- Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming table stakes. Contact center leaders can use AI to pinpoint agents' skills gaps, identify performance patterns, and provide AI copilots to assist agents. It can also enable leaders to take a more data-driven approach that can make course correction more palatable to agents, basing training and corrections on all the interaction data rather than a sampling.
- Areas like sentiment analysis are evolving into measures like agent empathy analysis, which uses speech and text analysis to enable managers to understand the agents' empathy separately from the customers' sentiment. This can be really helpful for agent engagement because some customers will always be unhappy, no matter how empathetic an agent is. Empathy analysis allows managers to separate the need for potential corrective action with an agent who's not being empathetic from a simply impossible-to-satisfy customer.
- True WEM gives employees agency. With copilots that can support them as individuals, choices of gamification and rewards, personalized goals and advancement opportunities, and even things as simple as effective WEM give employees more control over their work days and their employee experiences.
- Integrated contact center and WEM capabilities are key. Unifying contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) and WEM enables managers and supervisors to truly have that single pane of glass for managing CCaaS and WEM capabilities and oversee interactions, performance, learning, and employee engagement
- WEM is quality management. As real-time data, speech, and text analytics and AI come together, integrated WEM can provide both real-time intelligence and ongoing quality and compliance reporting and auditing, enabling contact center leaders to be both more effective coaches and quality managers.
Rebecca Wettemann is founder and CEO of Valoir.