Digital workforce management is a new trend in the world of digital transformation for business, which means it has some unique benefits and advantages over traditional workforce management practices and techniques. Nonetheless, not all businesses have already adopted such digital workforce management systems, and these companies would like to know what are the measurable advantages of implementing such a digital workforce management system and whether it will have respectable ROI (Return on Investment) and influence on key business decisions and business processes or not.
Thus, let’s find out what is digital workforce management system, how does it work, what is digital workforce definition and how to build a working digital workforce strategy.
What is digital workforce management?
Digital workforce management refers to practices and tactics that are used to manage the work of your employees by operating certain digital tools to improve team performance and productivity. Also, as digital workforce refers us to the use of automated tools, such as voice robots, IVR system and AI-driven self-service options, digital workforce management often includes the use of such technologies in order to improve the overall operational efficiency of the team work, eliminate repetitive tasks and save the time of human employees and digital workers for resolving more complex tasks.
Thus, digital workforce management allows you to manage the work of your team, set tasks, control their progress, ensure collaboration and effective communication inside the team, and also involve automation options to ensure synergy between human workers and AI-powered (Artificial Intelligence powered) tools through robotic process automation.
What are the benefits of digital workforce management?
1. Improve team productivity
The first and the most essential advantage of digital workforce management systems is that it allows your employees to do work more efficiently and complete more tasks because of effective control over tasks and processes inside the organization. By the way, digital workforce management system is the only way to find out how fast certain employees complete their tasks, what actions do they need to complete to get the task done, who they need to contact to get it accomplished, and so on. Overall, a digital workforce management system provides you with a big picture inside internal business operations in your team, which will help you find out the imperfections and improvement areas.
2. Simplifies onboarding process
If you want new employees to develop professionally faster and avoid any issues during onboarding process, especially such popular problems as lack of internal communication and lack of mentorship, then a digital workforce management system will be a great option to pick up. New employees will be available to communicate with their team leader directly in the interface of the system and report on tasks, which will help them feel that there is an opportunity to communicate constructively and that they are not left alone with the challenge.
3. Control over employee performance
It is not an uncommon issue when some employees do less while others do more. Without a digital workforce management system, it is impossible to get relevant data that would show the difference between performance of two certain employees, which means you will not be able to even discuss this issue, as there is no clear evidence of poor performance. Even if there is no need to do so and all your employees do well, you can now track their professional progress and find out difficult tasks which require help from your side or other higher management.
4. Effective planning
To plan the tasks for a month ahead, you have to understand how much work can be accomplished by each certain worker - thus, you need a tool that will provide you with such valuable insights. So, adopting a digital workforce management system is a great idea, as it helps you to measure average resolution time for all types of tasks for all employees, which means you can plan how much they will be ready to do within the following month or quarter. Remember that effective planning determines the success of your business.
5. Better customer experience
When it comes to managing your workforce resources in customer-facing business, where even one negative customer experience can cost you a fortune (at least one customer), it is extremely important to control how every single task is accomplished. Therefore, using a digital workforce management system is the best option to identify problem areas at their early stages, where the assistance of more experienced employees may be required to resolve the issue.
6. Data-driven decision making
One of the most important business tactics you can use here and now is data-driven decision making. This is possible only when you have access to relevant data and it can be quickly analyzed and processed, thus it has to be delivered in a comprehensive and timely manner. Digital workforce management systems do provide you with all data you need to make thoughtful decisions timely, so you will avoid many problems and will be able to resolve issues faster before they can lead to truly negative outcomes.
7. Better employee experiences
Human workforces, especially remote workers, have their performance depended on their experience and comfort - thus, job satisfaction becomes a vital aspect of building digital workforce platform and switching your team to digital landscape. Remote workforce often suffers from lack of communication, skill gaps, lack of real time reaction to issues, poor workforce management software, and so on. Operating digital technology in the form of digital workforce management tools will help you to improve employee engagement, motivate frontline workforce and frontline workers with the impact of technology on automation tools, elimination of manual tasks, etc.
What features should a workforce management system have?
1. Statistics and analytics
First of all, you have to get unlimited access to such vital data regarding the work performance of your team, such as a number of tasks accomplished, task cards for each of them, average resolution time, projects your employees are working on, and so on. Also, the best option for you is to analyze data deeper, including specific metrics that refer to your business. For example, in call center industry it is extremely important to monitor customer service agents performance in such fields as speed of service and quality of service, thus most contact center solutions are capable of measuring service level, average call duration, average handling time, agent occupancy and utilization rates, and so on. All these customer service metrics allow call center managers to understand whether agents provide required quality of service or not and act based on the data analyzed.
Therefore, the wider are the statistical and reporting capabilities of your digital workforce management system, the more opportunities for further improvement and problem solving you get.
2. Assigning projects and tasks
This is obviously the most basic, yet one of the most significant features of a digital workforce management system. Task management is extremely important in modern business world, as there are dozens of different employees with different responsibilities and projects they are involved in, which means you have to provide them with tasks timely, and also with an option to differentiate these tasks by the criteria of importance, urgency, assignee, and so on. All these features provide you with option to track employee performance and plan your work - for instance, with the use of digital workforce management system you will understand estimated resolution data for each task which will make it possible to forecast when the project will be completed.
Moreover, using digital workforce management system offers you an opportunity to set different statuses for dissimilar tasks which means you will be able to see which tasks are done, which have to be reviewed, and which are in progress or in queue to be resolved.
3. Internal communication and cooperation
As any modern businesses, especially those that represent the SMB sector (small and medium-sized enterprises), know that one task can involve a few employees from absolutely different departments or units of your organization, which requires you to offer a comprehensive and easy-in-use communication platform where employees can contact each other and complete the task without spending the most time on trying to find the appropriate person to communicate with. Thus, employees have to be able to leave their comments on tasks, create subtasks, or use internal communication tools to get in touch with each other.
Internal communication is also vital for employees to find solutions quickly and efficiently, which won’t require to access the higher management or any other
4. Scheduling
Another obvious, but essential feature of any digital workforce management system that you require to include in your digital workforce solutions is scheduling. It is no surprise that many businesses have both in-office and remote employees, and some industries rely on hybrid scheduling where sometimes in-house and remote employees don’t even know each other personally. Nevertheless, it is still vital to let them communicate with each other at least on the topic of their schedules - for industries where there is no regular scheduling and it is flexible, it is vital to get all schedules optimized so there will be no periods when no one can work and any other conflicts because of that. Thus, using digital workforce solutions that have a scheduling module is a great option, as employees can set their schedules personally, but they won’t be able to edit them after some point - for instance, editing closes when there are 7 days left to the moment when the employee is going to take the shift.
How can a digital workforce management system help call center improve performance?
1. Better quality of customer service
You can’t identify some indirect issues with customer service quality - such as slow average response time, long average call duration (or even too high), call avoidance, and so on - and thus you need a digital workforce management system. With the deep insights into your agents performance, you will be able to identify which aspects of their work can affect customer service quality and afterward, you will be able to react timely and effectively resolve any issues to improve customer satisfaction and customer experience.
2. Higher agent satisfaction
Agent satisfaction is a vital aspect of call center operations because low agent satisfaction will not only cause agent turnover, but also lead to low customer satisfaction, poor call center performance, and so on. Therefore, ignoring the issue of low agent satisfaction may cost your a fortune, but use of digital workforce solutions will have only positive effects on this vital call center metric - agents will have more options for internal communication and cooperation, easier access to tasks and assistance in the case of need, and also an option to plan their work and thus show better performance results, which has never had negative influence on employee satisfaction.
3. Improved customer experience
One of the most important aspects of customer-brand relationship is customer experience as it defines all other vital factors of your further partnership: customer retention, customer lifetime value, customer lifecycle and customer loyalty. Poor customer experience always means nothing but huge problems for business, so you have to do your best to eliminate any risks for it to be experienced by your clients - and digital workforce management systems can help here by providing you with deep insights into agent performance and by better management of agent tasks and assignments.
4. Reduced operational costs
What do digital workforce management systems offer? An option to resolve the same tasks with fewer employees involved or with less time spent on issue resolution. What does this mean for your business? Lower operational costs and also decreased upfront costs, which will make any reliable and capable digital workforce management system a cost-effective solution for a call center that really wants to become a cost-efficient and capable customer service department.
Conclusion
Digital workforce transformation is a trend nowadays, and this allows businesses to experience numerous benefits compared to traditional tactics and methods of managing the workforce and human resources. First of all, the digital workforce strategy allows you to get more relevant information about internal processes in your teams and react to challenges faster and without spending valuable time until the consequences are really harmful. Secondly, digital workforce management systems are useful for effective planning and improved customer experience, which will result in increased customer retention and customer loyalty.
For call centers, digital workforce management systems are must-haves as they offer numerous benefits for improving agent performance and productivity, optimizing agent satisfaction, and reducing operational costs. Nonetheless, it isn’t a good idea for a call center to pick up a third-party digital workforce management system and then integrate it with current contact center solution - it is much more cost-effective and beneficial to find the call center software with built-in workforce management module.
Where to find one of these? Well, you don’t have to go far - we offer a comprehensive and capable modern contact center solution - Voiptime Cloud Contact Center that has numerous workforce management features, and even if you want more, you can still integrate with any third-party software you use or want to use.
