Elevating CX in 2024: Workforce Management for Exceptional Customer Experiences

Quality customer experience doesn’t happen by chance. It demands product/service quality, optimized customer journey, and most importantly, excellent customer service. In any organization, the leading factor for the quality of the customer experience is the employee. These are the people who create the product, organize the process, and deliver the experience to the users. If you want to elevate CX in 2024, you need to build a customer-centric culture and properly manage your employees. 

In other words, you need proper workforce management.

Why Workforce Management Matters

Primarily, workforce management is important because it keeps your employees happy and productive. It also keeps them working for your company – something that’s especially important nowadays.

Today’s employees have different priorities from before. They expect quality work conditions and jobs that offer excellent employee experience. According to a Glassdoor study, 56% of workers now rank a strong workplace culture higher than a bigger salary. 

We live in a very competitive market where companies fight to attract – but also retain the best talent. This is the world of The Great Resignation, a time when people separate from their jobs in search of a better place to work.

In this competitive job market, maintaining a strong workforce management strategy is crucial for fostering a positive employee experience. To stay on top of things and create a positive work environment, you need to use a reliable employee management app.  As companies vie for top talent during The Great Resignation, it becomes essential to prioritize factors beyond salary, such as workplace culture. A well-crafted engineering resume may highlight technical skills, but in the broader context of talent retention, it is crucial to showcase transferable skills and achievements through a compelling narrative. Consider seeking assistance from executive resume writers who specialize in crafting impactful career documents. The employee experience plays a pivotal role in shaping a company’s success. Additionally, incorporating professional corporate headshots can further enhance your executive resume’s effectiveness.

Think of this as a domino effect. If your employee is unhappy, the chances of your customer being unhappy are high. An unhappy employee won’t treat your customers better than you treat them. 

So, if you’re focusing on the CX, you can’t neglect the employee experience – and their work at your company. Creating an amazing customer experience relies mostly on the work of your employees.

That’s why workforce management matters. 

In an ever-changing customer service landscape, implementing cutting-edge technology is paramount. To ensure a seamless and secure connection as part of your workforce management strategy, consider integrating a reliable VPN for PC , such as Fastest VPN . This ensures that your employees can securely access important tools and data, helping to optimize the customer experience. Enhance your CX in 2024 by implementing advanced solutions to improve employee efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Let’s create a common scenario for a customer that uses your business. 

The customer needs to reach out to your contact center. They call or write in the chat, and the agent responds almost immediately. They are cheerful, professional, and rapid in solving the problem or answering the question.

The customer is happy.

Here is a scenario B. A poorly managed or unhappy employee will do the opposite in this phase of the customer journey. They won’t be happy, so they won’t be cheerful. They aren’t properly guided or managed, so they’ll struggle to find a solution fast.

The result? You’ve failed the customer at the first point of their journey. 

After the call, a satisfied and quality employee will follow through and tackle the customer’s issue. A disgruntled employee will delay the process, make a mistake, and frustrate the customer. 

Which is the better option?

If you want a good CX, you need well-managed employees. To get that, you need workforce management. 

6 Workforce Management Tips that Elevate CX

Strategic management of human resources in a company is critical for effective work and consequently, a good customer experience. Here are the steps you can take to manage the workforce in a way that will elevate CX. 

1. Streamline the Budgeting Process

Budgeting in companies is very burdensome, lengthy, and, in most companies, very manual. Office politics do not help the matter, so if you want to manage your workforce more efficiently today, you need to start with the money. 

This can be streamlined very easily. If you want to make matters simpler, more accurate, and less stressful for your employees, you can learn more about budget tracking software. From budgeting automation to forecasting, tracking software can streamline the work at your company, reduce errors, and keep your workers within budget.

Here is what you can achieve with a budgeting tool:

• Forecast budgets across the organization
• Integrate budgeting with real-time reports
• Track and manage cash flow and operations with ease
• Inform employees of the budget and restrictions in real time keeping.
• Stay on track with your organization’s financial goals
• Enhance collaboration and transparency in financial planning

2. Implement AI voice generation

Your workforce can only achieve so much without help. In a busy period for your business, your employees will be tired, overwhelmed, and possibly unable to cater to every need of every customer.

Thankfully, artificial intelligence has made it possible for companies to automate and streamline just about every communication with the customer. 

For instance, you can use AI voice generation to assist your workforce in handling customers and collecting their data. AI voice generation is useful for many reasons, including:

• Personalized product recommendations

Your employees won’t have to manually collect or analyze data such as customer purchase history or browsing behaviors. AI can analyze this information instantly and offer recommended products using AI-generated voice messages. 

• Personalized greetings and messages

AI voice generation can create greetings for your customers based on past interaction data. Your employees can use AI to analyze data and understand the customer’s preferences such as language, style, and tone – and automate this to improve the CX.

• Customer feedback analysis

Gathering customer feedback has become a common practice at companies these days. It allows them to address customer concerns in an empathetic, personalized manner. With tools like AI voice generation, this can all be automated. Gather Employee Feedback with SurveySensum

3. Monitor employee performance/ provide constructive feedback

Workforce management should be based on how the employee performs. That being said, if you want to help employees in offering quality customer experiences, you need to monitor their performance – and gather their feedback. 

A workforce management team will monitor the quality of work, and the flow in the company throughout any given day. 

Thankfully, there are many tools that can automate and organize this in reports. Based on how people perform in the company, you can offer them real-time feedback that will help them improve. 

4. Forecast staffing needs

At any given moment, your organization should know what the customer expects and what they need. Before you set any realistic service goals, you need to know what your company’s staffing needs are.

Take, for instance, a call center. If you want to know how many employees you need to offer fast and quality responses to the customers, you need to have an understanding of the historical call volume, as well as the average time an employee needs to handle a query. 

At any given time, your company needs to know how many people it manages – and how many people it needs. Workforce management is reliant on having the right number of people tackling customer requests.

If you don’t have a sufficient number of people in your workforce, your employees will be tired and frustrated, and so will your customers. 

5. Utilize customer survey data

Who better to ask about the work of your employees than the people who deal with them directly – your customers? Part of workforce management is to use the data you gather from your customers to improve the work of your employees. 

There are many ways to collect data from your customers and this includes surveys. There’s a survey you can send out to evaluate each stage of the customer journey. This will tell you what you need to improve when it comes to your employees’ work.

This method is viable in almost every industry, even in healthcare. In a hospital or clinic setting, your customers are patients. And their opinion matters.

Use a quality patient management software tool to make data gathering easy and convenient. Many patients are quick to complain about bad customer service, so you need to ask the right questions to learn about their overall experience to help make your business better.

6. Optimize scheduling

Time is a delicate matter when you’re managing a workforce. You need to plan for everything including absenteeism, people leaving their jobs, peak hours, etc. 

If you want your workforce to work without glitches – and without overworking – you need to transition to a more effective scheduling process. 

Scheduling is much more efficient if you use technologies to keep track of everything. Good scheduling software can help you do the following:

• Display open shifts so employees can choose their preferred work hours
• Identify the peak hours and assign more employees during those periods
• Notify employees whenever a schedule changes
• Keep track of everyone’s work schedule
• Offer more flexible shift options to your workforce
• Remove the burden of working overtime

When your employees are burned out, they won’t perform at their best. If they can’t have frequent downtime i.e. breaks, this can also affect their work and with it, the customer experience. 

If you want to reduce employee stress, you need to optimize your team’s schedule. 

The Role of Workforce Management in Customer Experiences

Setting up your employees for success happens before they get a customer call or meet a client. These are the people who create the products and offer the services, and their performance is greatly reliant on the employee experience. 

The employee doesn’t even have to meet the customer or directly interact with them to affect the CX. Their work will affect it in some way – good or bad. 

Everything can affect employee performance: when they started to work, how many days they’ve had off in the year, how many breaks they took, and even who they work with. 

If you want people to be happy and work at their best, you need to manage the workforce. 

Workforce management empowers the employees and gives them the tools to do their jobs. A properly managed employee can deliver the required service because he is equipped with the resources, information, and training that allows him to do so. 

Workforce management inspects their behaviors, improves the bad, and validates the good. 

Finally, workforce management collects and analyzes powerful data that can optimize the employee lifecycle. 

How have You Been Managing the Workforce?

In 2024, if you want to elevate customer experience, you need to have fierce workforce management. The link between employee and customer satisfaction is more visible now than ever. Implementing tools for budget tracking, AI voice generation, scheduling, and employee performance tracking, are just a few of the many options you can use to elevate CX. 

Do you have any other tricks under your sleeve?