Contact centers face a harsh new environment that is blurring the boundaries between workforce management (WFM) and other applications.
Like living organisms, business organizations evolve over time, driven by changes in their environment. More subtly, the tools and processes people use in performing work evolve as well, driven by the users’ changing needs.
Perhaps nowhere in the enterprise is this more evident than in the applications and related processes used in contact centers. Two cornerstone applications – workforce management and quality monitoring – are changing at a more rapid pace than at any time in memory. This unprecedented transformation is being driven by the shifting requirements of management at the executive and contact center levels. At the enterprise level, executives are increasingly hard-pressed to deliver profits and shareholder value in an environment that grows increasingly competitive by the day. At the contact center level, management teams are being forcibly matured by the wicked convergence of familiar internal drivers with powerful, new external forces.
As a result, leaders are being forced to ask themselves: Are we workforce managers of the future, or of the past? Failure to adapt to the changed environment carries the consequences of lost revenue, profit and customer loyalty. It also makes retaining the best employees difficult. Faced with new requirements, management support solutions in the contact center are undergoing a purposeful blurring of application boundaries. By thinking about contact center solutions in a new way, centers can avoid fatal imbalances between effectiveness and efficiency.
If you would like more information on this topic, a new white paper from Witness Systems discusses the changes that are under way, and how they will impact your contact center now and in the future. This paper focuses on the reinvention of workforce management within the context of business and technological drivers. It addresses how new pressures are morphing existing workforce management applications into holistic workforce optimization solutions that transform traditional contact centers into strategic assets that deliver greater value to the enterprise.
Click here to download "The Reinvention of Workforce Management"