Back-office workforce management in the contact centre

Back-office performance management and workforce optimisation has often been problematic due to difficulty in measuring processes and limited visibility of agent performance.  This situation has changed due to the capability of workforce optimisation solutions that can measure activity, schedule staff and provide performance metrics.

Screen capture is used to measure the all-important call handling time for each process. This enables a staffing requirement to be calculated based on the back-office service level targets. This opens up all of the benefits of workforce management in terms of forecasting volumes, and scheduling of staff to optimise resource.

Back-office staff will also benefit from features traditionally utilised by the agent: engagement tools such as shift swaps, holiday bookings and fairer schedules, for example. This helps to reduce the “us and them” mentality between front and back office and potentially offer a more varied workload.

Gone are the days when back office was seen as the poor relation in terms of process management and improvement. Solutions exist where the dual benefit of improved efficiency and enhanced customer service are available and enterprise planning is becoming the norm. This has been seen to be the case in more and more businesses nowadays in this day and age in terms of how this plays a role in the running of a business - and businesses large and small in size.