Enterprise Workforce Optimization - Taking a Closer Look Date:   Tuesday , July 12, 2016 Verint Systems (Nasdaq: CRNT) sells software and hardware products for security, surveillance and business intelligence domains to assist clients in analyzing large amounts of data. The company currently has a market cap of $2.07 billion. Enterprise Workforce Optimization offers organizations a comprehensive way to capture, evaluate, manage and analyze omni-channel customer interactions across customer service operations in the contact center, branch and back office. As customer expectations evolve, so must the approach that your organization takes to deliver service. Customers want consistency, whether they use the contact centre, the branch, social media or self-service channels. To excel at multi-channel service, your organisation needs to ensure that all channels operate in a single, virtual service arena. Only through a streamlined CRM and workforce optimization strategy can you offer a consistent customer experience. With interactions taking place across various communication channels and organizational touch points, it no longer makes sense to manage service delivery in functional silos. You need an enterprise approach to customer service, with the ability to manage the employees who are part of the service delivery process, regardless of their department or functional area. Although many enterprises work hard to deliver a quality customer experience, they\'re often hampered by the different systems, applications, people, and processes that play a role in delivering service. And while the contact center, branch, or remote office is typically the focal point of customer anger when things go wrong, in reality, a break or disconnect anywhere in the customer service value chain can impact the customer experience, no matter how flawlessly the other parts of the chain have performed. Sometimes, these breaks are obvious; when call volume in the contact center spikes because a product recall has been announced or a dividend payment delayed. But there are other, more subtle breaks that can be difficult to detect by traditional quality monitoring processes - an automated notification system fails to work properly, prompting customers to call the contact center to check on the status of their orders. Or perhaps the limited hours of operation in the service center causing customers to defect to a competitor whose hours are more favorable. Situations like these can have repercussions that are seldom good for business. Customers may become angry and defect. Or an increase in contact volume might strain staffing resources to the limit, upsetting customers and employees alike, and the addition of temporary staff to handle the workload may eat-up profits. Enterprise Workforce Optimization Offers a Solution Organizations need better visibility into what\'s really happening and why it\'s happening, across customer service operations, not only in the contact center, but also in branch and back-office operations, such as order processing and fulfillment. And they need it presented in a way that\'s easy to understand and actionable. Enterprise workforce optimization (WFO) solutions are designed to address these needs by combining software and services for critical customer service applications, including recording (IP, TDM, SIP, and screens), quality management, desktop & process analytics, workforce management, performance management, eLearning and coaching. Workforce Management helps organisations forecast work volumes based on historical trends, so that they can put schedules in place for employees and monitor their activities in real time. Competency management is all about ensuring that organisations have defined and deployed competency frameworks for all levels in the workforce, so they can up-skill and promote employees appropriately. Quality management uses voice recording technology and coaching modules to offer organisations a framework for monitoring interactions and ensuring a consistent customer experience. Performance management measures the performance of the staff against key performance indicators in real time, with the results easily accessed on desktop dashboards and configured for all organizational levels. To enable these applications to share data and work together seamlessly, leading enterprise WFO solutions provide a unified architecture. They also offer a single point of access to functions, locations, and data; single system administration; a single agent database; a single security model; and a single graphical user interface (GUI) for easy navigation across applications. This can help in quickly gaining access to information for faster decision making. Other advantages include simplified system administration & maintenance, real-time enterprise collaboration, intuitive interfaces & navigation, and reduced total cost of ownership. As a result, they can make information collected in different areas of your organization available at the click of a button, thus offering you greater insight into workforce performance, customer interactions, customer service processes and customer loyalty than you might receive with different systems and applications. This intelligence is based on real data from actual interactions, and you can share it across your organization. Benefits of Unified Workforce Optimisation Unified WFO solutions offer many benefits. They can help organization save money by automating manual processes, reducing unnecessary work, lowering training costs, and enhancing efficiency across the departments that serve customers. Additionally, they can help them in the following ways - Capture and analyze customer interactions, journeys, and sentiments across channels; enhance the quality and security of customer interactions; drive deeper engagement with customers and employees; improve internal processes and compliance; boost employee productivity & performance, and uncover business trends & areas of opportunity. With unified WFO, enterprises can transform raw data into actionable intelligence, so they can understand what\'s happening in their business and why - and make better, faster, and easier decisions.