Simulation and Digital Channel Support

Nick Martin at NICE explore whether you have to choose between simulation and digital channel support.

A customer service agent doesn’t simply go to work and pick up the phone in today’s digital world; he or she is just as likely to be chatting with a customer or two while responding to a social media post from someone else concurrently.

It’s not just chat or social, either – many of the digital channels customers use to communicate with the businesses they do business with enable agents to handle multiple interactions concurrently, and session concurrency offers an efficiency benefit to contact centres.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not unlike the benefit offered by skills-based routing, which also helps optimize resources across the enterprise. Just as digital channels require a WFM solution enable to meet new complexities, skills-based routing can be difficult to manage without the appropriate tools.

In short, skills-based routing involves dynamic routing that creates an interdependency between employee requirements and schedule creation. This interdependency is problematic for formula-based solutions that are only able to represent dependent and independent variables based on past experience.

Simulation, however, can overcome those challenges with a framework designed to model the ever-changing interrelationships between customers, employees, skills, contact routing algorithms and management techniques.

The question, then, for workforce managers, is whether they have to choose between efficiency with simulation and support for digital channels.

Simulation can allow a contact centre to optimize employees with multiple skills, while digital channel support enables the contact centre to optimize the number of concurrent sessions in which those multi-skilled employees interact.

True optimization for the contact centre should consider both; choosing simulation over digital channel support, or vice versa, will result in lost efficiency.

The good news is that not all WFM solutions require workforce managers to choose between simulation and digital channel support.

To stay competitive, businesses need a WFM solution that is ready for interactions that can go beyond the traditional.