January 21, 2016
WFO, or workforce optimization, is a concept that has been around for a while but has only recently begun to gain traction in the call center industry. The idea behind it is that if you can optimize what your employees do and how they do it, your bottom line will show the difference. Yet what many fail to realize is that the staff you hire can have a greater impact than the employees you already have on staff.
That’s the view of Jennifer Waite, Product Marketing Manager at inContact, a leading provider of cloud-based call center solutions. In a recent blog post, Waite took a closer look at WFO and shared some valuable insights.
“The hiring process is often overlooked as a key step in implementing an effective WFO strategy,” she maintains. “An agent’s relationship often begins many weeks before handling the first customer interaction, and academic research has found that the candidate’s perception of the hiring process has a direct impact on his or her overall satisfaction with the company and his or her performance potential.”
As such, Waite concludes that the hiring process—and the new hire’s perception of it—is just as important to a successful WFO strategy as selecting the right technology. She examines three distinct parts of the process and explains why they are important:
Attraction: “A company’s website careers page will attract active job seekers—those who know what they’re looking for and where to look—as will leading job sites such as Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo Jobs, and the like,” Waite says. But passive job seekers need to be attracted as well. Social media can play a big role in helping draw them in, she adds.
Selection: A critical part of the selection process is screening candidates for their ability to handle the rigors of contact center work. “This is typically done through a recruiter-led phone interview in which a recruiter asks the agent candidate a series of questions designed not only to validate the candidate’s skills, but also to gain insight into his or her communication style, energy, and personality—all of which are critical success factors in customer-facing roles,” Waite says. Basically, it’s designed to ensure that the candidate will fit in with the existing team.
Retention: “This is where the worlds of recruiting and WFO effectively come together,” Waite believes. New agents need to complete a comprehensive training program to prepare them for the rigors of contact center work. But if done properly, new employees will soon become veterans, and the next generation coming up behind them will want to follow their example.