When I was younger, I would always ask my dad, why he used the same shaving cream. Why did he only use Crest Toothpaste. Or why he wouldn’t look for a new job after experiencing difficult times at work. And each time his answer was simple: loyalty. That was just how his generation was built, if you find something good, you stick with it. Unfortunately, loyalty is no longer a common practice in the 21st century.
So what exactly does this mean? It means that we’re in a new era, an era of information, the web, social media and SMS. Information can spread just as fast today as an avalanche heading down an icy slope. So how do you as an organization combat this new age? The answer is simple, by providing excellent customer service and putting your employees in a position to add value and wealth to the organization.
Workforce optimization (WFO) (workforce management, quality monitoring, speech analytics, etc.) is a critical enabling technology in this regard; it provides tools to help better serve customers in a cost-efficient manner, and put employees in a position to succeed through continuous development with each customer interaction. When implemented via best practices, WFO can help contact center leaders:
· Make better business decisions
· Evaluate employee productivity
· Improve employee morale and productivity
· Identify customer trends
· Better understand your history to plan for your future
So, whether it is the ability to make better decisions based on agent skill-set, forecasting based on historical trends or the use of speech analytics to place the proper context on customer conversations, managers and agents can use data extracted from a WFO solution to propel service levels within the contact center. And, in so doing, creating a customer-centric atmosphere that will not only make my father proud, but will certainly reinvent the way the my generation (Millennial) will come to define, loyalty.
The only question remains, are YOU customer loyal?
Brandon Rowe, WFO & Customer Enthusiast