Harness the Power of Workforce Management as a Service to Support Your Entire Business

How Workforce Management as a Service Maximizes Your Most Valuable Resource

The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on all aspects of our lives has led many to ponder the future of work. What will workforce management look like going forward? How can businesses best manage increasing numbers of remote employees and online consumers?

Workforce management as a service (WFMaaS), like the team of experts and supporting technology offered by iQor, is a powerful way to improve your workforce’s engagement, productivity, and flexibility today and into the future. Based on the software as a service (SaaS) model, WFMaaS takes a service-oriented and consultative approach to workforce optimization, employing the best people, processes, and systems to maximize the value of your workforce. 

What exactly is WFMaaS, and how can it improve employee engagement and customer experience? This post goes in-depth on WFMaaS and how it can fine-tune the most precise forecasts, enable efficient scheduling, and engage employees to better serve your entire business. 

What Is Workforce Management as a Service? 

Workforce management (WFM) is the process of optimizing employee productivity and delivering a customer experience that consistently meets expected standards. However, workforce management as a service refers to an external organization’s or consultant’s expertise in that process of skill, resource, and service optimization, helping you better manage employees, processes, and service outcomes.

As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, iQor provides WFMaaS to help you match employees’ dexterity to job requirements whenever needed. WFMaaS is two-fold: it offers WFM technology and a team of experts to provide a comprehensive service tailored to your business to optimize results. iQor’s best-in-class workforce management team and our supporting WFM technology create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business. The WFM team shares best practices and provides a consistent support network for all clients so you can expect the same level of amazing service no matter the program or location. 

What Can WFMaaS Do for You? 

WFMaaS offers an array of benefits to help you accurately predict the future, gain real-time insights, and create space to meet more targets across your organization. Specifically, WFMaaS helps you: 

• Increase efficiency and productivity – Solve for omnichannel complexity with multichannel forecasting, multi-skill scheduling, contact center agent self-service, competence development, and monitoring of real-time and past activities. 
• Improve planning and governance – WFMaaS provides you with a dedicated WFM team to streamline processes, review your metrics on a regular basis, and plan for your staffing needs. 
• Analyze current workforce management metrics – A WFMaaS provider can bring together data, insights, and industry best practice benchmarks to examine your service key performance indicators (KPIs) such as service levels, average speed of answer (ASA), abandonment rate, average handle time, and customer satisfaction. Based on these metrics, your WMaaS team can recommend improvements and process automation that will improve the customer experience, assist employees, and benefit your bottom line. 
• Forecast capabilities more accurately – Enhanced algorithms, automation, and AI help predict staffing levels down to the half-hour to increase occupancy and generate efficiencies for amazing service. 
• Provide oversight in real-time – Keep agents focused and on time, manage omnichannel queues, and modify schedules and staffing to meet demand and identify anomalies. 
• Empower agents to manage their schedules – Agents can see their schedules in real-time and request changes instantly. 
• Scale with the cloud – With a WFMaaS entity that uses cloud-based infrastructure, you can scale to the speed of your business and instantly add new teammates. 

Who Needs WFMaaS? 

Robust workforce management solutions assist companies across every industry. In particular, B2C businesses with omnichannel customer support experiences—voice, email, chat, text, social, and digital agents—need integrated solutions for increasingly tech-savvy customers. 

The future of work requires service agents to match and even go beyond the digital literacy of their customers to provide an amazing customer experience (CX). 

WFMaaS helps businesses bridge the gap between complexities. Some of the industries that benefit from WFMaaS for better customer experience include: 

• Communications, media, and technology – Develop loyal customers with tech-savvy customer support teams. 
• Financial services – Skilled experts can quickly help your customers respond to market changes. 
• Healthcare – Provide compassionate and empathetic support teams that stay current on all regulatory changes. 
• The public sector – Build connections with the people you serve, offering the same superior customer experience as B2C entities. 
• Automotive – Help customers make educated buying decisions. 
• Travel and hospitality – Let customers contact you through the most convenient channel for them, using scalable, omnichannel CX solutions. 
• Retail and e-commerce – Scale CX teams for seasonal and event-driven volume seamlessly. 
• Energy and utilities – Meet seasonal demands cost-effectively and connect with customers during weather events. 

Why Has the Need for WFMaaS Increased? 

More businesses want to offer multiple channels for customer engagement to enhance the overall customer service experience. Doing so requires skilled employees who can keep up with the demands of an omnichannel CX model. WFMaaS meets these needs by: 

• Sending customer interactions to the right resource. 
• Managing and ensuring schedule adherence for all channels. 
• Improving workforce planning automation. 
• Making accurate workload predictions. 

Leveraging Candidate Skill Sets Through WFMaaS 

One of the primary goals of WFMaaS is applying workforce resources where and when they’re needed. With analysis and consultation from WFM experts, your company can start this process before candidates are hired. As a result, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the skill sets your organization needs and can pick those attributes during the recruitment process. 

Why Does Workforce Management as a Service Matter? 

Workforce management as a service enables efficient scheduling and employee engagement, no matter which industry you’re in. It adjusts as needs change. Coaching and other ad hoc activities can be planned with updates based on ramps, contact arrival patterns, and trends. By better optimizing your workforce to serve your customers’ needs, you simultaneously create experiences that make customers and employees smile while reaching your business goals. 

How Does WFMaaS Result in Better Customer Experiences? 

WFMaaS offers your business the tools to develop a flexible, skilled workforce that meets customer demand. Your brand and customers are unique and deserve personalized solutions. Consulting with WFM specialists can help you find valuable CX data and insights that enable better customer solutions and more responsive customer success teams.  

When your customers experience meaningful interactions with skilled agents, it instills trust in your brand. 

The Benefits of the Inherent Consultative Approach of WFMaaS 

WFMaaS isn’t just software. Its consultative approach allows your business to work directly with experts on your management and workforce evaluation processes. Your workforce needs are unlike those of other businesses, so choosing a WFM solution strategically tailored to your needs will provide invaluable workforce optimization. 

Experts like the WFM team at iQor will take the time to understand your workforce and business goals. Consultants can leverage the latest technology to devise creative and innovative solutions suited to your workforce plan. You don’t have to worry about learning how to use a new workforce management tool or platform on your own. Instead, your WFM consultants will guide you.

A WFM consultant will also teach you how to interpret all the data they collect to predict staffing requirements or forecast your capabilities with high accuracy, for example. 

With WFMaaS combining sophisticated and flexible WFM tech with passionate, dedicated WFM professionals focused on strategic management, you can enjoy rapid scalability and superior customer experiences at the same time. 

WFMaaS Improves Engagement, Productivity, and Flexibility 

Increasingly tech-savvy customers, remote working and mobile employees, and self-service are growing areas of workforce management that WFMaaS addresses to ensure optimal experiences. 

The increase in remote workers introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic has presented new opportunities in WFM. Work-at-home employees face challenges such as isolation, lack of socialization, and distractions at home. WFMaaS can empower companies to improve mobile workforce management by implementing technology that supports flexibility and work-life balance for virtual staff. 

Indeed, WFMaaS addresses ongoing staffing requirements as well as seasonal staffing needs. Further, WFMaaS optimizes remote workforce management with solutions such as incorporating interaction analytics, automating low-level queries, using chatbots, and relying on a cloud-based infrastructure. Streamlining processes and equipping your workforce with flexible self-service capabilities improves the employee experience and creates a happier and more engaged staff.

How Does WFMaaS Meet the Needs of Tech-Savvy Consumers? 

As customers become more tech-savvy, it’s essential that customer service offerings meet them on the channel of their choice whenever they want. Providing superior service through various channels ensures valuable customer experiences that elevate your brand.  

To this end, omnichannel CX enables customers to use the channel they’re most comfortable with to engage with an experienced customer service agent. Utilizing WFMaaS helps deploy proactive strategies to reduce overall interaction volumes and improve the customer journey by making the information they seek readily available to them through their channel of choice. 

The Need for Connected Channels and Seamless Experiences 

WFMaaS can help ensure your channels are aligned with your customers’ needs. By digitally enabling your agents with tools, such as robotic process automation, a unified desktop, unified omnichannel customer relationship management software, and AI-powered recommendations, you allow your agents to do their jobs better and faster. Seamless integrations ensure your customers can self-serve when needed but also receive live support as part of an integrated experience if one channel doesn’t meet their needs. Creating a powerful digital customer experience through a comprehensive digital transformation strategy can not only provide exceptional experiences for your consumers, but it can also free up time for agents to focus on more meaningful interactions. As a result, they can provide more caring and empathetic service. 

How to Mobilize a Successful WFMaaS Strategy for Your Business 

Experts at an experienced BPO like iQor can develop a personalized WFMaaS strategy for your business. The development process should optimize your workforce value and enable workforce planning to boost employee engagement, productivity, and customer satisfaction. 

Experience the iQor Difference 

iQor is here when you need us most. Our agile workforce management culture and flexible cloud-based technology enable rapid scalability and superior customer experiences at the same time for a powerful experience. With our WFMaaS capabilities, we provided a 500% increase in FTEs to meet a gift retailer’s seasonal peak demands. We hired 1,500 customer support experts in two months and served 35,000 customers during the client’s peak holiday shopping week. 

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX. 

Our award-winning CX services include: 

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries. 
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice. 
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI. 
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers. 
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want. 
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers. 
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business. 

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Neeraj Thakran is vice president of workforce management at iQor.