So long scheduling nightmares: Meet your new contact center WFM solution

What if there was a better way? What if customer support leaders could move past the scheduling nightmares and manage their contact center agents with ease? What if we told you the solution is ... ‘adhere?’ 

If you’ve ever led a customer support team or managed a call or contact center, you know the challenge of scheduling agents and preventing burnout first-hand. Without a proper workforce management solution, it’s easy to see why leaders struggle to fulfill staffing needs and often wonder: 

• How many agents do I need? 
• Are they scheduled at the right time? 
• Are their workloads manageable?
• Are they as productive as they need to be?
• How does this impact the customer experience?  

We get it. Trying to staff a team during heavy call times is hard. Working to meet your KPIs and customer service benchmarks without a clear view of your agents' performance is overwhelming. Not to mention, the Great Resignation has made it hard to keep hybrid teams engaged and minimize attrition in an industry with high turnover. But it doesn’t have to be. 

To ease these challenges and improve agent productivity, we’re excited to introduce the first offering from our Workforce Engagement Management suite: Zoom Workforce Management. Unlike other standalone workforce management solutions, Zoom Workforce Management removes the need for multiple vendors. It’s fully integrated with our cloud contact center to help you streamline communications, manage agent needs, and transform your customer experience all from a single, unified platform.

Because let’s face it, contact centers are the epicenter of your customer experience operations. They serve as the central hub for customer interactions and empower employees to deliver positive customer experiences that generate the brand loyalty we crave. But when multiple agents resolve high-volume issues across siloed workforce tools, it’s no surprise that support team leaders are left to manage operations through disjointed systems. 

Built to complement Zoom’s omnichannel contact center and AI-powered virtual assistant, our workforce management software is the latest addition to Zoom’s customer experience solutions that help support teams create a better way to work. While our AI chatbot helps customers self-serve and reduce heavy call burdens for agents, Zoom Workforce Management helps streamline forecasting, predict agent workload, and more accurately estimate headcount to keep agents happy and deliver positive customer interactions.

Most organizations are trying get customer experience (CX) culture to resonate throughout the entire organization, not just the contact center! But many times CX is tackled in a silo. Workforce management (WFM) is about having the right people, in the right place, at the right time to serve your customers’ needs. It impacts the agent, business, and customers' outcome, or “the ABC’s of CX.” Transformative organizations understand that they need to solve for CX, employee experience (EX), and WFM collectively, so Zoom bringing WFM into their platform now makes sense to impact these ABCs.

Juanita Coley, CEO, Solid Rock Consulting

What if you could use real data to manage and schedule employees instead of just guestimating? Our workforce management software includes three key areas to help you deploy the right agents at the right time:

• Forecasting
• Scheduling
• Intraday management

We’ve all wanted a crystal ball at some time or another, but what if you could actually predict your future support needs? Zoom Workforce Management leverages AI and machine learning models so you can pull data directly from Zoom Contact Center to predict your call volume and call handling time for scheduling up to four weeks at a time. Now it’s easy to analyze historical trends, from high volume moments to holidays, and determine your future staffing needs. 

Why reinvent the wheel? Zoom Workforce Management uses forecasted data directly from Zoom Contact Center to help you generate recurring schedules that you can easily adjust as your needs change. Map your agents’ status inside the contact center and automate calculations without the need for messy spreadsheets. Using dedicated modules, you can easily see your agents’ activities, manage their work shifts, schedule various groups, and build flexible schedules from a single application. 

Zoom Workforce Management provides adherence metrics to provide a quick view of agents who are out of adherence in increments of < 1 minute, 1-5 minutes, and > 5 minutes. Whether you need to rewind several weeks or months or see real-time adherence, you’ll always know how agents are performing and can identify quick wins to help them improve. 

This was recently true for the plan management services provider, My Plan Manager, who underwent a Beta testing of our WFM solution and uncovered new efficiencies around the real-time adherence capabilities and its ease-of-use. 

The Zoom WFM real-time adherence tool is clean and incredibly powerful. It used to take us hours to cross reference agent status codes against their adherence, but now it’s visible for us in seconds with the filtering capability. We’re no longer flying blind! The addition of the summary adherence data showcasing all of our agents and also the individual agents’ daily adherence result eliminates the need for extra reports, or navigating to extra locations. Having used other adherence tools in the past, the ease of use within this tool enhances the user experience. Whether you’re a real-time analyst, team supervisor, or a manager, it assists with making fast and impactful decisions.  

Rick Files, workforce optimization analyst, My Plan Manager 

Generating a positive customer experience often begins with happy employees. When agents are stressed and overworked, it’s hard to make a great first impression and deliver excellent support that keep customers coming back. So why use a workforce management solution that’s more complex than it needs to be? 

Zoom’s workforce management software is easy to use, intuitive, and reliable, and best of all is cloud-based to help you scale up and down as your team evolves. Contact us today to learn how to improve your contact center efficiencies and increase agent engagement with our customer experience solutions.