Workforce productivity is crucial for contact centers to remain competitive in the market. It will help them convince customers that they have the potential to build customer loyalty, win new customers and increase revenue.

Pommie Lutchman, CEO at contact center solutions provider, Ocular Technologies, defines “workforce productivity” as being a concept that includes applying technologies that go beyond traditional forecasting and scheduling applications, empowering contact center staff to take responsibility for their own contributions and tying contact center metrics to business goals such as growth and profit.

To achieve their business goals by improving workforce productivity, contact centers need to reset goals to achieve greater productivity. Workforce managers must also establish goals and metrics for reaching corporate expectations for business success and ensure new staff understands the importance of these productivity goals.

Contact centers need to create a work environment that is conducive to productivity. Automation of key processes will reduce the clerical jobs. Enabling real-time views of staff members’ performance for self-monitoring, and tying contact center metrics and processes to their performance goals will improve the efficiency of the staff.

Implementing the right technology is also crucial for the success of contact centers.

“Having the right technology makes it easier to manage the workforce and allows for the shift from cost-efficiency to workforce productivity. Importantly, workforce management solutions must be implemented and utilized with corporate/ business goals in mind,” Lutchman said in a release.

The most valuable technology to improve workforce productivity is analytics, according to Lutchman.

“Workforce productivity equals workforce management plus analytics. It creates a structured process, through which a company can manage and improve its overall performance.”

Contact centers should be able to focus on relevant statistics, based on the objective of the company coupled with the overall objective of the contact center. Contact center managers should also be able to administer agent performance based on business goals.

Giving insight on key performance indicators (KPI) to each staff member will increase staff productivity, according to Lutchman. Different views should be available for agents, supervisors, managers, executives or business owners and support staff.

According to Lutchman, the contact center should use an analytical tool that includes navigational mechanisms that allow a user to drill down into the data and identify root causes of performance challenges and shortfalls.

The analytical applications, Lutchman says, should be applied to more than just the contact center and customer-facing business processes. They should be used to analyze the management of the infrastructure to gain insight into trunk usage, glean data around web site traffic and track and measure IP bandwidth.

Contact center investment will yield biggest returns if the workforce management practices and technologies focus on empowering staff to make the largest possible contribution to achieving the company goals.

“With multichannel contact centers, consumers are more informed than ever and the competition is fierce. The only way to keep customers happy and acquire new ones is to differentiate on something other than price and this means changing the way the workforce is managed,” Lutchman concludes.

Recently, Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) reported that The European contact center outsourcing market earned revenues of $18.349 billion in 2010, and could reach more than $22.5 billion by 2017.

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