Prioritising EX means loosening strict AHT and adherence targets put in place to ensure efficient CX delivery. Improving CX requires the effective balance of productivity metrics with performance and training requirements – usually with an ever-shrinking budget. Increasing operational efficiency has often damaged both EX and CX as agents are stretched to cover greater demand, risking significant burnout.
Typical imperatives to ‘realise efficiency gains’ and reduce cost to serve have meant that most of the time, contact centers have prioritised productivity through rigid scheduling and harsh adherence monitoring, leading to cultures where burnout, low engagement, and poor customer service are common.
Through real time intelligence and Intraday Automation operations become agile to volatility without creating inefficiencies, and flexible to the needs of agents – empowering them with autonomy over their work-life. The business then reaps the rewards of engaged, productive, and highly trained teams.
WFM plans are often “perfect” when published but become outdated by the time a shift starts and then further disintegrate as operations fail to keep up with intraday events like sickness, lateness, and unexpected spikes in demand.
Managers & team leaders chase adherence to a dated plan while real time teams become overwhelmed with high friction, low value tasks, working as middleware between that plan and reality. The business pays in overtime and burnout as it tries to find bodies and time to meet the increasing demand, while customer wait times & abandon rates skyrocket.
With Intraday Automation, powered by real-time intelligence, QStory uses AI to intake, analyse, and propose or fully automate actions to proactively overcome threats to service and take advantage of opportunities for schedule optimisation – creating an agile operation that is seamlessly flexible to fluctuations in demand and supply.
While front-office operations are flooded with sources of real time performance and productivity data, the back office remains a ‘visibility void’, where planning relies on standard unit times (averages) and estimated occupancy rather than true measures of average handle time and productivity.
Resource planning becomes a game of ‘educated guesswork’, resulting in chronic under or over-staffing and backlogs that spiral out of control before they are even detected. Operations remain siloed and brittle; front-line agents often sit idle during quiet periods while back-office tasks sit in a growing queue, causing a ‘black hole’ effect where productivity is unmeasured.
QStory’s Work Item Manager functions like a ‘Back Office ACD’; itemizing, prioritizing, and distributing tasks while capturing the true handling time of every specific work item in real time. Using definitive data, the platform enables a truly blended operation and a liquid workforce. Algorithms automatically identify opportunities to redeploy agents between live channels and asynchronous work based on fluctuating supply and demand, ensuring backlogs are cleared efficiently and management reclaims hours of lost administrative time.
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