Multiskill, Multichannel Workforce Management: Is It Right for Your Contact Center?

Published By Aspect Communications

• Published July 2003
• 10 Page(s)

Not too many years ago, a call center managed its workforce by predicting the number of customer calls that would come in and scheduling agents to meet the prediction. Using Erlang formulas and early voice response systems, managers were able to forecast call volumes and effectively handle overflows when they occurred. But today’s customers are using new contact channels, and businesses are implementing new technologies and management processes to handle those new channels and meet customer demands.

Call center managers in particular see the effects of these new demands. Today’s customers use e-mail, Web-based orders, and faxes, as well as the telephone, to order products, take advantage of services, and request support. As new contact channels become more accepted and widely used, and customer bases become more global thanks to the Internet, the numbers and types of contacts will only increase.

Call centers will have to keep pace with the new technologies and evolve into contact centers that can manage the new customer contact channels. Workforce management systems will still forecast the number of customer contacts, but they will also have to forecast them by communication channel and contact type before they calculate staffing requirements. Contact center managers will have to make much more complex workforce management evaluations to meet customer demand and manage operations.

And they will have to answer the even more pressing questions of which agents should deal with which contacts—and how. Most contact center agents will have to know not only how to handle phone interactions successfully, but also how to communicate effectively via e-mail and fax, interact by telephone and then respond by mail, and interact via the Web and telephone at the same time.

The CRM software industry coined the terms multichannel and multiskill to define these contact centers and agents, and CRM literature predicts the inevitability of the multiskill, multichannel contact center.

In this new multiskill, multichannel environment, workforce management applications are mission critical. They ensure that an agent with the right skill is available for every type of contact. Because of this, many workforce management vendors include multiskill, multichannel functionality in their software. Before jumping on the multiskill, multichannel bandwagon, however, decision-makers need to understand the capabilities of this functionality, in addition to the new contact center technologies on the market today. Even more important, they need to know the specific business and customer trends affecting their companies, so they can make the right decisions about whether and when to make use of the multiskill, multichannel functionality of today’s workforce management solutions.

This paper will help executives and contact center managers understand the capabilities of the new multiskill, multichannel functionality as well as the issues involved in managing the multiskill, multichannel contact center, so they can make sound decisions regarding workforce management solutions.