Warning: Zombies have infected your contact centre workforce. You can’t escape these agents of the undead, lifelessly pacing around muttering brains… service levels…smoke break.
As contact centre professionals and leaders, I think we have to ask ourselves two questions: Are we causing this workforce apocalypse? Are we giving our forecasters, schedulers, managers, and agents the proper workforce management (WFM) tools to stave off zombiefication?
Let’s take a tour around the contact centre floor to see the four types of agent zombies we are fighting today – and more importantly, how we’re going to cure them. No weapons are needed for this journey.
Stiff Spreadsheet Forecaster Zombies
Here’s a particular Stiff Spreadsheet Forecaster Zombie with lifeless eyes coming towards you. A spreadsheet worked fine when the contact centre was voice only, and just a dozen or so agents. But your business has grown, adding channels and agents working in house and virtually. Those spreadsheets have grown too – just not in a good way. They’re bloated, stiff, impossible to read, and confusing.
The cure: A managed WFM service, like Genesys Guru, can take on the forecasting of your workforce, bringing you insights you will never get in excel. Bring life back into your forecaster’s eyes with visibility into your staffing requirements based on historical data, and clear forecasts that match your needs.
Disengaged Agent Zombie
There’s a whole slew of Disengaged Agent Zombies out there on the floor chained to their desks, rotting in a perpetual cycle of monotonous wait. They’re waiting for training to be scheduled, waiting for approval for time-off requests, and waiting for shift swap confirmations. They have no hope of ever casting off their chains. But proper workforce management empowers agents and brings them back to life. With Genesys WFM, holidays can be requested and accepted/declined instantly with rules defined by your business. Agent-initiated exceptions enable them to take control of their own training. In addition, supervisors can manually approve or allow the WFM solution to work within coverage rules to approve. You can completely reanimate your agents by letting Genesys Guru show you how to automate all of these requests.
Floor Manager Zombie
It seems no one is safe from the zombification. Here is your call centre manager being clawed at from all sides and becoming Floor Manager Zombie. Schedules were his downfall, as yesterday there were tons of agents milling about with nothing to do. Today, it’s post-apocalypse city. The Floor Manager Zombie can’t fight off infectious scheduling. He doesn’t know who is in, who should be off, who is in training – and nobody seems to be getting their annual leave properly. WFM allows managers to monitor their agents, assess coverage for the expected call volumes, update the schedule of agents who are off sick, and even add training sessions to the quiet times of the day. Add Genesys Guru to the mix, and this thankless job is turned over to them, allowing your Zombies to self-cure, and get back to helping customers!
Missing Parts Zombie
The Missing Parts Zombie is aimless wandering the centre looking for brains and intelligence. Right now, they’re staring at various reports with different bits of information on each. Call volumes on one report, headcount on another, average handle time on another. This is no way for a supervisor to report upwards to management. Even if the supervisor is part of the undead! With WFM, a manager can get a single, easy to understand report showing that calls are being handled efficiently, SLAs and KPIs are being met with room to spare, and the agent pools are adequately staffed – all with show no signs of zombiefication, naturally! Genesys WFM has the contact centre performance report to show number of agents, interaction volumes, AHT, service level, ASA, and percentage of interactions abandoned as forecasted vs. actuals. You’re doing life rejuvenating work – you should have some reports on your overall health to match!
Don’t let zombies infect your contact centre workforce! There are cures out there that can bring your agents, supervisors, and managers back to life. I’m confident even the nastiest undead creatures can be cleansed with a healthy dose of workforce management, and a shot of Genesys Guru expertise.
Cris Bjelajac
Cris is a Senior Director of Program Management for the Workforce Optimisation product suite.
For additional information see Genesys’ Company Profile
