POOR PROCESSES AND INFORMATION CAN CAUSE BACK OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY LOSS

Clearly, something has to change in an increasingly global marketplace one in which customers expect personal, immediate and satisfactory customer experiences. Traditional solutions for business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM) create workflows and processes, but they cant effectively handle todays myriad requests, employees, systems, and workloads. As a result, gaps prevent managers from effectively and efficiently assigning tasks and monitoring performance against their specific business metrics.

Enterprise Workload Management (EWM) addresses the business need for the intelligent assignment and monitoring of work based on skills, availability, service levels, and priority. CRM, ERP and BPM tools are designed to automate the capture and forwarding of work: BPM systems manage the volume and complexity of customer requests and move data among systems, while CRM and ERP solutions help users leverage data to deliver business results. But none of these manage workloads, workforces or workflows, matching people to processes and information based on their skills, knowledge and availability. With EWM, you can understand which workers are available, where they are, what skills they possess, what pending work they have, and any existing priorities they need to focus on first.

That intersection of people, data and processes are key: in todays fast-paced business environment in which contact center agents must juggle multiple tasks, access reams of back-office information, and leverage the knowledge and expertise of line-of-business employees in real time.

And the results of using EWM can be dramatic: Imagine a customer service operation in which each and every agent is performing to maximum effect - rather than cherry-picking customer calls, each rep answers the ones that are funneled to him based on his unique expertise and experience. Instead of performing to average response times, each agent handles customer interactions as quickly and efficiently as she personally can. Every agent is armed with the information and access he needs to deliver first-contact resolution, as well as handle cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

In the real world, companies are seeing significant EWM impact: An insurance company implementing the Genesys Enterprise Workload Management solution improved average response to customer requests from an average of 21 tasks per day handled by each worker to 36 tasks per day, an improvement of more than 58 percent. Likewise, a large bank is using just 560 employees to finish work that previously required 1,000, nearly doubling productivity; and a communication service provider increased productivity by 16 percent to 32 percent across provisioning and support teams.

Todays customer expects whomever he is interacting with to know everything about him and his relationship with the business; but he also expects contact center agents to be knowledgeable about this particular problem, and empowered to solve it then and there. By optimizing workload assignments and prioritizations, enterprise workload management solutions ensure that every customer experience is supported by an agent with the right skills at the right time, thereby lowering customer effort scores and increasing overall customer satisfaction, as well as driving productivity throughout the organization.

For more on the benefits of enterprise workload management, and why back office productivity is so important to a successful contact center, check out the Genesys webinar on the Top 5 Plays to Improve your Back Office Productivity for 2014. Genesys has outlined key strategies and capabilities that will help you provide your customers with a consistent end-to-end experience, increase operational efficiency and boost employee morale.