By Rebecca Wise Girson, Integrated Marketing Manager, NICE Systems

There is a lot of talk about balancing operational efficiency with customer satisfaction, as if focusing on one requires an automatic sacrifice to the other. Though it is true that initiatives around operational efficiency typically start out as ways to cut costs, “do more with less” and get “lean and mean,” when approached in the right way, these initiatives can actually serve to drive greater overall customer satisfaction. To understand the impact, let’s take a moment and put ourselves in the customer’s shoes…

Call “Waiting” Center
We’ve all been there. We make what we think will be a quick call to purchase a cool new pair of shoes to wear to Cousin Mary’s wedding and, before we know it, we’re a participant in the waiting game. If it weren’t for the fact that these shoes are the perfect shade of green to match our dress, we’d have hung up the phone a long time ago. We vow to never order anything from this company again just when the customer service agent finally comes on the line.  “Thank you for calling ‘Shoes Come In Twos.’ How may I help you?”

Back Office Backlog
Three weeks have passed since we ordered our shoes and they should have been here by now. The person we spoke to even verified that they were in stock. Cousin Mary’s wedding is in two days so we make another “quick” call to check on our order only to be told that the fulfillment house has an unexpected backlog and that our shoes should be shipped later that week. We say “thanks, but no thanks,” and cancel our order.

Operational Efficiency (and Workforce Management) to the Rescue
Our scenario paints an all-too familiar scene that takes place on numerous occasions in businesses throughout the world every day. So much effort and money is spent just trying to attract customers in the first place, only to risk losing them at the point of sale (or point of fulfillment in this case) by not recognizing the important role operational efficiency plays in customer satisfaction.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, there is a technology designed specifically to support operational efficiency initiatives that can transform your call “waiting” center and help you get a handle on your back office backlog. And that technology is…workforce management.

Workforce Management is perhaps one of the most strategic investments an organization can make towards achieving both their operational efficiency and customer satisfaction goals. When applied to front office operations, workforce management enables contact centers to minimize wait times through accurate forecasting to determine staffing needs, efficient scheduling of agents against the forecast considering their availability and skills and intraday visibility to ensure agents are doing what they are scheduled to do when they are scheduled to do it.

When applied to back office operations, workforce management provides many of the same benefits and more. Because back office environments typically suffer from a lack of accurate and timely operational data for planning, forecasting, scheduling, and monitoring performance, there are often fewer structured processes, little best practice sharing and limited insight into employee performance. With the right workforce management solution capable of integrating data from disparate systems, including home-grown applications, these limitations are no longer obstacles that stand in the way of driving process improvement, greater operational efficiency and, ultimately, increased customer satisfaction.

Achieving operational efficiency and customer satisfaction is no longer an either/or proposition. For the front office and the back office, today’s workforce management makes achieving both possible.