Dynamic Workforce Management

Automated, ‘best available’ decisions to manage agents and balance work load, across all media channels

At a Glance

Contact center software Dynamic Workforce Management

Blends agents to deal with inbound spikes

Contact center software Dynamic Workforce Management

Balances work load, across all media channels

Contact center software Dynamic Workforce Management

360 degree view of all relevant factors

Contact center software Dynamic Workforce Management

Enables best use of agent/ supervisor time

What is Dynamic Workforce Management

Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) automatically blends agents across inbound/ outbound work and balances the work load of customer contact sessions, across all media channels.

This dynamic workforce management addresses two priorities of every customer-facing organisation:

  1. minimising the time customers spend waiting to be served
  2. minimising the time agents spend waiting for work.

Addressing a complex challenge

Back when ‘contact centers’ were ‘call centers’, and agents handled one voice call at a time, this balance was maintained by automated call blending – having agents do outbound work, moving them over to inbound when demand spiked, and moving them back again when demand decreased.

With the rise in expectation for contact across all media channels – voice, email, chat, social, etc – the software challenge is much more complex. As well as having to balance inbound/ outbound workloads, the software must also balance across different media channels with very different performance measurement points. For instance, chat SLAs may govern both initial response time and time taken to send a message to a customer while chatting.

To successfully balance priorities in this environment, software must respond to a variety of demands. For example:

  • Bringing in chat agents to handle voice sessions during peak periods
  • The trade-offs to be made on between voice and chat SLAs
  • Balancing multiple queues across many different projects
  • Multi-disciplinary agents with different skills across lots of workloads
  • Some agents will be better than others at handling multiple sessions.

 

The Automatic Session Distributor (ASD®)

To address these challenges, right at the core of the Sytel solution is an engine that manages dynamic workforce management in real-time: the Automatic Session Distributor (ASD®). The ASD® is the multi-media/ multi-session extension to the traditional call center ACD.

Blending and balancing work load

SCC automatically blends agents across inbound/ outbound work and the ASD load-balances customer contact sessions across all media channels.

1. Agent blending

SCC automatically moves agents to cope with any spikes in inbound demand on any media channel, without reducing performance in any other workloads.

But wouldn’t taking agents off an outbound voice campaign cause a spike in abandoned calls?

No, because SCC’s dialing algorithm takes account of all campaign conditions including agent numbers. It automatically and instantaneously adjusts the dialing rate accordingly, so that outbound predictive dialing performance is not compromised.

2. Balancing work load, across all media channels

The ASD automatically assigns contact sessions to agents with the most appropriate skillsets, or even previous interaction with the customer, and capacity within their personal workload to handle them.

During slack periods of inbound activity, agents can be kept busy with less time-critical work, e.g. email. At peak times, they can be moved up the value chain in response to demand, and back again when demand allows.

Automatic ‘best-available’ decisions

SCC’s dynamic workforce management allows real-time, ‘best-available’ decisions by:

  • transforming all sessions into an equivalent format, so that all sessions can be distributed, analysed and worked on using the same mechanisms
  • having central, 360 degree, real-time access to data on all activities and resources within the system – agent skills, sessions in progress, identity of caller, SLA targets, wait times, etc.

 

Improving performance across the organisation

Dynamic workforce management improves performance for customers, agents and supervisors by:

  • reducing the time any customer has to wait in a queue by automatically moving agents where possible to handle the load
  • automatically minimising agent idle time, with the scope for productivity improvements of 20% or more
  • automatically adhering to any and all SLAs, protecting organisational reputation and keeping customers happy by not keeping them waiting
  • making the best use of supervisor time and skills. The supervisor simply ensures that SSC knows what skills agents have, sets appropriate SLAs per queue, and can focus on getting the best from their agents, not the technology.
  • making ‘best-available’ decisions far more efficiently and accurately than any supervisor, so human error is minimised if not eliminated altogether
  • allowing organisations to rethink their legacy WFM systems. The ASD® provides workforce planning outputs that allow you to plan staffing, but will also manage the media landscape in real-time to ensure 100% occupancy, regardless of peaks and troughs in call, chat and email volumes.
  • enabling organisations to be more agile and flexible, adding channels and workflows without worrying about detrimental effects to existing work.
Learn more about the agent perspective of dynamic workforce management in the blended media desktop.

Explore more of SCC’s capabilities:

Latest posts

Intraday Automation – Real-Time Workforce Management

Intraday Automation – Real-Time Workforce Management

Real-Time Automation for Workforce Management (WFM)

Real-Time Automation for Workforce Management (WFM)

AI and Automation in the Contact Center – Part 2

AI and Automation in the Contact Center – Part 2

AI and Automation in the Contact Center – Part 1

AI and Automation in the Contact Center – Part 1

Predictive Dialing and Cell Phones – A Way Forward

Predictive Dialing and Cell Phones – A Way Forward

Predictive Dialing and Vendors

Predictive Dialing and Vendors

What We Offer

Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) - multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.

Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.

All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.

Flexible Contact Center Software

Softdial Contact Center™ - rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale
  • Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

    CCaaS for subscribers - global service​, with no upfront costs

  • Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners

    Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software

  • Contact Center Platform – Enterprise

    High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid

Blended Media Desktop

Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace

Work Anywhere

Browser-based tools, no software installation required

Customise, Localise, White Label

Design all user interfaces to individual requirements

Integration via APIs

‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps

World Class Development

Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries

Capabilities

Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.

All Media Channels

Voice, chat, email, social, etc - fully integrated and blended

Agent Multi-Tasking

Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel

Dynamic Workforce Management

Automated, ‘best available’ decisions to manage agents and balance work load, across all media channels

Predictive Dialing

Best-of-breed performance under compliance

Optimised Inbound Routing

Smart rules and 'best-available' decisions to drive great customer service

Agent Scripts

Help agents achieve and maintain excellence

Voice and Screen Recording

See and hear exactly how agents are interacting

Analytics and Data Feeds

Measure and evaluate performance at every level

IVR, Bots & Conversational AI

Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers

Customer Journey Tracking

Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations

Modules

Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance

Softdial One™

Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators

Softdial Scripter™

Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications

Sytel AI Dialer™

Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules

Softdial Pathfinder™

Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection

Softdial Media Server™

Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls

Softdial Reporter™ 5

Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels

Softdial Publisher™

Comprehensive data output to build your own reports

Softdial Recording Monitor™

Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards

Softdial Campaign Manager™

Automation to optimise any outreach strategy

Softdial Repository™

Central storage and configuration of common resources

Sytel Global Compliance™

Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer

Solutions

Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications

By Business Type

Enterprise

A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale

Small/ Medium Business

Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves

By Industry

Customer Service

Connect quickly to well equipped agents

Market Research

Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration

Debt Collection

Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app

Sales & Telemarketing

Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing

Healthcare

Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care