Transforming WFO into CEM



Unify Omni-Channel Analytics with Big Data Management

By Bob Brittan

Workforce optimization (WFO) is traditionally used to optimize the performance of the workforce within an enterprise in order to establish customer satisfaction. The market is rapidly transforming to first capturing and then analyzing 100 percent of the customer experience (since sampling does not provide sufficient insights) at every touch point and every channel in order to determine the optimization necessary to create a positive customer experience.

The expanded use of multichannel customer contacts such as phone, email, SMS, chat, and social media, with both structured and unstructured data, require a cohesive customer experience strategy. WFO can deliver on the promise of front-office and back-office unification to provide a seamless customer experience. Nonetheless, all of the many customer transactions and interactions generating data from the multichannel contact sources still reside in data silos. Leveraging this “customer journey” data into meaningful customer intelligence is the next big enterprise and contact center transformation: customer experience management (CEM).

The transition of WFO to CEM requires an omni-channel method to capture relevant customer experience data from every channel, including calls, emails, chats, desktop transactions, customer surveys, and social media. However, capturing 100 percent of the information from all channels produces massive amounts of data, known as big data.

Omni-channel analytics can greatly assist managing big data by automatically analyzing the captured data from each channel and producing only actionable knowledge. The resulting actionable knowledge is channel-dependent and does not provide a holistic, actionable knowledge across all channels. There remains the challenge of associating and encapsulating relevant data from multiple channels to produce a unified and cohesive, actionable knowledge. This latest challenge in big data management can be resolved utilizing advanced cross-channel analytics solutions.

The traditional WFO model has been an inside-out approach to create customer satisfaction. This was accomplished by recording, analyzing, and optimizing the interaction of available internal resources (such as agents) toward customers to create customer satisfaction. CEM enables an outside-in approach: Interactions are recorded and analyzed on all customer experiences at all customer touch points toward the company to align and optimize internal resources (such as agents) to create a positive customer experience.

Transforming today’s WFO to CEM can be done through the unification of WFO and big data management, in which omni-channel capture and analytics, combined with cross-channel analytics, can transform customer experience big data from each channel to across all channels in order to discover actionable knowledge, trends, and actions. The resulting filtered data can yield unexpected benefits that can further align business intelligence with operational goals and objectives.

Bob Brittan is the director of marketing at OnviSource, Inc. Bob has more than twenty years of experience in consulting, product marketing, and social media marketing for emerging enterprise technologies and contact centers focusing on front- and back-office workforce optimization, automation, and unification solutions.

[From Connection MagazineMarch/April 2016]