It can be difficult to decide which bandwagon to get on board. Once you pick one, when do you get on? Is this a fad or a trend? A market ripple, a wave or a tsunami? Which one is worth the investment of time, effort and capital?
Will the Seattle Seahawks, 2014 Super Bowl Champion, be the next great NFL dynasty? Or, will they fall back into the old ways of their previous 38 years. Which rookie’s baseball card should you buy hundreds of now so that you can sell them for a huge profit in 25 years after he is inducted into the Hall of Fame? Get it wrong and you will be stuck with mountains of Nomar Garciaparra baseball cards instead of all the Derek Jeter cards you passed on because you hate the Yankees.
Missing the train, or picking the wrong one, can have significant and lasting repercussions. Some manifest themselves as bragging rights for your friends while others can result in your business stagnating while competitors roll on down the tracks. Today’s contact center marketplace is a rapidly changing and fluid world. Case in point, the term “contact center”, or the even more cutting edge “customer engagement center”, is the new and more accurate terminology. No longer does “call center” apply in today’s multichannel world. The contact center of today and tomorrow must be agile and flexible to remain relevant and in tune with the changing tides of customer service. In short, it must be intelligent.
The current and standard workflow model for a contact center moves in a predictable order. Agents are assigned to queues based on skills and proficiencies. Work schedules are created and agents are slotted into shifts. Shifts are worked, calls are taken and placed, data is recorded and tabulated into results. Quality Assurance and Control, or Quality Management, is implemented – customer service surveys are conducted, resulting data is analyzed and is used to evaluate agents. The schedule is adjusted and the great customer service circle of life churns forward. It is a method that works in a get-the-job-done kind of way. However, it is that middling level of efficiency that your competitors hope to see you accept.
The Workforce-Intelligent Contact Center ™ is a concept describing the two way conversation happening between the ACD/ IVR and your WFO tools. Workforce- Intelligence regularly analyzes and automatically modifies priorities and skills to remain an efficient provider of customer service solutions. Workforce Optimization (WFO) tools, implemented through a cloud platform, create as near to a living and breathing entity as a brick and mortar contact center can be. Workforce-Intelligence recognizes patterns and automatically adapts with real-time queue modifications and traffic-flow adjustments. It implements QA results and can be set to add or remove agents from certain queues, add or remove skills from agents’ profiles and change their proficiency levels.
As stated earlier, the Workforce-Intelligent Contact Center concept is revolutionizing the way your contact center systems speak to each other. It is creating deeper interoperability and core functionality to drive efficiency in your business. And the value-add is Workforce-Intelligence is core innovation that you receive by being an NICE CXone ACD and WFO customer.
If you already have NICE CXone ACD and WFO, then you have the core intelligence to drive productivity throughout your contact center. Please contact us for training options and more information. If you are not an NICE CXone customer yet, we have seats available on the Workforce-Intelligence Express. Much like the lovable Dumbo who always could fly, he just needed the feather to convince himself. Your contact center can be a trend-setter for intelligence. Please contact us at NICE CXone to learn more about the feather.
