The Importance of Omnichannel and Workforce Management
‘Omnichannel’ seems to be everywhere right now, and there’s a good reason for that. An omnichannel approach to customer service can greatly benefit a company. But it can also make workforce management harder handle. With the introduction of omnichannel, it’s important to also consider how to organise your operators in the most efficient way. But why is that?
Let’s start with a little history. ‘Omnichannel’ has its roots in ‘customer centricity’, back in 2003, when US retail company Best Buy shifted their focus from sales and toward customer experience to beat their main competitor, Walmart. Best Buy quickly realised that, in order to compete effectively, it must not only provide an amazing experience in-store, but also online. Best Buy wanted to create an experience for the customer that put them at the centre, choosing which Best Buy services to engage with and essentially creating their own customer journey. Regardless of whether this vision ever panned out for Best Buy, this is where the concept of omnichannel was born.
Since then, various events have changed the way we view omnichannel. In 2004, Facebook first launched. While it didn’t have a huge impact on the retail scene immediately, we all know and value the importance of social media in the customer journey today. Twitter was not far behind, launching in 2006. In 2007, the first iPhone was released, revolutionising the mobile phone industry and kick-starting mobile retail. In 2011, Amazon released a price-checking app that expanded the consumers’ mobile commerce world even more, firmly placing itself on the map as the online store to shop with for, well, anything. And since then, companies have started to take notice. The term ‘omnichannel’ has become more and more popular and ever more companies are integrating it into the customer journey.
And with that integration, comes new challenges. Namely, workforce management (WFM). At its most basic, omnichannel gives you more channels to control. Does that mean you need to employ even more operators to cover those new channels? Not exactly. It means operators need to be trained how to deal with different channels; they need to be able to seamlessly move between channels as efficiently as possible in order to provide a consistently excellent service across each channel. Solutions like Gnatta can help with that, but it’s still important that you’re able to forecast how many operators you need at any one time.
As channels like social media and webchat become more popular, it’s important to factor chat concurrency into your forecasting. Unlike telephony, operators can handle more than one chat at a time when dealing with these channels. So, as you integrate more channels, you also have to figure out what the best chat concurrency is for your company. How many chats can your operators handle before you notice a drop in both experience and efficiency? And, when factoring that number into the equation, how many operators do you now need at any one time? Often, introducing an omnichannel solution makes your customer journey much more efficient, meaning you’re actually forecasting for fewer operators during peak periods than you used to be.
But integrating omnichannel is not a one-step process. Customer service — and customer service channels — are ever-evolving. Channels and retail online is moving at an alarming rate compared to anything we saw even pre-2000. And that means it can be difficult to keep up.
Even at Gnatta, although we offer a simple software solution, we’re still continuously updating our software and introducing new features as we predict and analyse new changes in the industry. This constant change in the industry can mean that your workforce management can quickly get out of hand as you struggle to keep up and employ too many changes at once — it’s important to employ a smooth system that can help you along that journey. WFM software like injixo can help companies with that transition by making forecasting and scheduling easier and, ultimately, providing a solution that is accurate and will make your operation effective.
