A recent white paper from Genesys Telecommunications Labs titled “Human Capital Asset Management and Workforce Optimization: Applying Techniques of Six Sigma” presents an approach to improving employee productivity by applying techniques to the area of workforce optimization originally derived from process manufacturing – “the methodology of one of the most popular of these business management strategy approaches, called Six Sigma.”
Developed by Motorola in 1981, Six Sigma originated as a set of practices designed to improve manufacturing processes and eliminate manufacturing defects, but has been applied to a wide range of other business processes since then. Its cardinal principles are that manufacturing and business processes have characteristics that can be measured, analyzed, improved upon, and controlled, and that achieving sustained quality improvement requires a top-down, and corporate-wide, commitment.
Read more here.
…
A recent white paper from Alcatel Lucent, titled “Five Steps to an Employee Effectiveness Model: Improve Business Results with Engaged Employees,” takes a look at implementing an Employee Effectiveness Model that brings together “a host of capabilities under a single umbrella to align training, job assignment, job scheduling, quality assurance and career development so that your workforce has the right skills to provide stellar service” to customers.
Yes, your organizations might already have some legacy systems in place for quality assurance, workforce management, coaching, e-learning and customer feedback, but as the paper demonstrates, such systems are usually passive and often siloed, and don’t provide the sort of benefits you hoped they would when you bought them.
The paper breaks it down into five steps to help companies build a more engaged, efficient and effective organization – “one with happier employees, more satisfied customers and a much healthier corporate balance sheet.”
Step one – plan. Not all communications channels are equal, nor do they require the same skill sets for successful customer interactions. A good Employee Effectiveness Model recognizes this, and can forecast and schedule employees based on actual trends across a variety of channels.
Read more here.
…
Industry observer Nancy Gohring recently took a look at the fact that with more and more businesses moving to the cloud, there are also a lot of different approaches being tried.
A recent worldwide survey of over 800 senior executives conducted by KPMG found that “41 percent of respondents said they are using or plan to use some kind of private cloud and 30 percent said they either are or have plans to use a public cloud,” according to Gohring.
So, should they build a private cloud? Or should they opt for a public offering? Maybe some combination of the above? Yes, yes and yes depending on your situation, is the advice dispensed by Rick Wright, head of KPMG's global cloud enablement initiative. He added that most companies end up with a sort of hybrid arrangement.
Read more here.
…
The blog produced by contact center vendor Fonality notes that there are “several emerging business and consumer trends” in Australian contact centers, trends which echo what’s happening elsewhere.
As Fonality officials say, according to a Frost & Sullivan report, some of these developments include “the growth of cloud computing and the increasing use of social media in both the workplace and customer households.”
One of the blinding advantages of cloud computing for contact centers is the elasticity it affords. As Fonality officials say, a cloud-based contact center is a scalable contact center, able to handle fluctuating call volumes without having to worry complicated installations. This way they can just pay for what they use as they use it, rather than having to put in a lot of hardware to handle higher capacity and watching it all sit idle for weeks.
Hand in glove with cloud capacity is social media, contact center agents connecting with customers on multiple platforms -- and yes, customers appreciate that. Frost & Sullivan found that social media accounted for “21 percent of Australia's total minutes spent online.”
Read more here.
