Don’t Let Your Contact Center Workforce Become The Walking DeadGenesys eBook

Keep your team human with more effective Workforce Planning

Table of ContentsTable of contents

Omni-channel CX Executive Zombie

Contact Center Manager Zombie

Stiff Spreadsheet Forecaster Zombie

Missing Parts Zombie

Disengaged Agent Zombie

Over-worked Wrong-way Zombie

Let’s take a tour around the contact center floor to identify the zombies in our midst and - more importantly - how we can cure them. The only weapons we need for this journey are Workforce Optimization tools and services!

You can’t escape these agents of the undead, pacing around listlessly, muttering to themselves about service levels, unfair schedules and not enough time for breaks or training.

As contact center professionals and leaders, we have to ask ourselves two questions:

Are we causing this workforce apocalypse?

Are we giving our forecasters, schedulers, managers, and agents the proper workforce optimization and management tools to stave off zombiefication?

You’ve seen them staring blindly into their powerfully strong espresso drinks…with stress written all over their faces and a truly wild look in their bloodshot eyes.

The CX Zombie can’t figure out why customers are leaving.

The world has entered the digital age…and your business along with it. You added new methods to interact with your customers, but all of this has complicated matters… especially when your channel touchpoints are individual silos of technology.

How do you provide consistent customer experiences (CX)? Do you know where your customers are and where they’ve been? How can you get a true picture of the end to end customer journey, and make informed decisions, if you don’t have insight across channels?

Having a good omni-channel Workforce

Management strategy will rejuvenate

agents and executives alike!

Omnichannel CX Executive Zombie

Here’s a Stiff Spreadsheet Forecaster Zombie with lifeless eyes. A spreadsheet worked fine when the contact center was voice only, and maybe a dozen agents.

But your business has grown. Life is more complicated now with more interaction channels and things happening in the cloud…and you have more agents - working both in-house and virtually.

Those spreadsheets have grown too – just not in a good way. They’re bloated, stiff, impossible to read, and confusing.

Managed WFM services like Genesys Guru,

can help you determine the best path, and

take on the planning and ongoing analysis

and optimization of your workforce, bringing

you insights you will never get from that

torturous excel spreadsheet!

Stiff Spreadsheet Forecaster Zombies

Disengaged Agent ZombieThere’s a whole slew of Disengaged Agent Zombies out there - chained to their desks, rotting in a perpetual cycle of monotonous tasks and waiting…waiting…waiting.

They’re waiting for work (and a much needed break!), in dire need of training, wanting approval for time-off requests and awaiting shift swap confirmations.

They have no hope of ever casting off their chains. But proper workforce management helps employees get more engaged, and brings them back to life.

Skills Management and training tools help you assess skill-sets and performance gaps, and even automate training to help your agents become the brand ambassadors for your business that you need them to be!

With Genesys Workforce Management,

holidays can be requested and accepted/

declined instantly, and agents feel

more engaged with the ability to

influence their schedules and keep up

to date on schedules/changes via their

mobile devices.

It seems no one is safe from the zombification. Here is your contact center manager being clawed at from all sides, unable to be as effective as she needs to be and slowly becoming a Zombie.

Schedules are her downfall: Yesterday there were tons of agents milling about with nothing to do. Today, it’s post-apocalypse city. This nightmare is due to ineffective scheduling.

sHe doesn’t know who is in, who should be off, who is in training – and nobody seems to be getting their annual leave properly.

Genesys Workforce Optimization tools enable managers to get the most value possible from their resources and employees. You can monitor agents, assess coverage for expected call volumes, update schedules for agents who are off sick, and even add training sessions to the quiet times of the day.

Contact Center Manager Zombie

The Missing Parts Zombie is aimlessly wandering around looking for brains and intelligence.

Right now, they’re staring at various reports with different bits of information on each. Call volumes on one report, headcount on another, average handle time (AHT) on yet another. This is no way for a supervisor to report upwards to management. Even if the supervisor is part of the undead too!

Genesys Workforce Planning provides easy to understand contact center performance reports showing if interactions are being handled efficiently, whether Service Levels and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are being met and if agent pools are adequately staffed.

You can also drill down further to gain useful insight like percentage of abandoned interactions as forecasted vs. actuals.

Understanding what's going on in your contact center will help you breathe life back into zombies across the business!

Missing Parts Zombie

These are the over-worked, over-stressed and overly-costly-due-to-unwanted-overtime zombies that run amok in contact centers all over the world.

Scheduling and delivery of interactions and work go hand in hand. One cannot live without the other...but more often than we would like to admit work is routed the wrong way – to someone who either has the wrong skill-set or who isn’t “on the clock”. This creates the dreaded Over-worked Wrong-way Zombie.

By integrating your workforce management solution to your routing system, you can stop delivering work to employees whose shifts are about to end, or who are already off-shift, reducing the high costs often associated with overtime. Through an integrated Workforce Planning strategy, and ensuring that your employees only get assigned to work that is both timely and appropriate to their skill-sets (Channels or work types? Languages? Special customers?), they will be happier doing their jobs, which reduces attrition and the high cost of employee turn-over (replacement and training).

Overworked Wrong-way Zombie

Don’t let zombies infect your contact center workforce! There are cures out there that can bring your agents, supervisors, and managers back to life.

Even the undead creatures with the worst attitudes can be fixed up with a healthy dose of workforce management, and Genesys Gurus can help cure any form of zombiefication!

Learn more about how to better manage and enable your contact

center staff with modern Workforce Planning techniques.

Check out

7 Key Capabilities for a Powerful Workforce Management Solution.

About GenesysGenesys is the market leader in multi-channel customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions in the cloud and on-premises. We help brands of all sizes make great CX great business. The Genesys Customer Experience Platform powers optimal customer journeys consistently across all touchpoints, channels and interactions to turn customers into brand advocates. Genesys is trusted by over 4,500 customers in 80 countries to orchestrate more than 100 million digital and voice interactions each day.

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