In our last “Ask Aspect,” we explored the realm of brand identity and design with our Lead Brand Designer José Ocando. Today, we’re taking it back to the world of workforce engagement management, and talking to one of our WEM experts.
Kelly Person started with Aspect in 2020 as a Solutions Consultant, providing customers with comprehensive and tailored solutions to their workforce challenges. After a series of promotions, Kelly is now our Strategic Manager of Solutions Consultants, serving as a key expert on our team. Prior to joining Aspect, Kelly spent over 20 years managing contact centers, wearing several hats in leading call center operations and workforce engagement teams. During this time, Kelly used several WFM platforms, including Aspect software, and eventually thought, "Why keep working for different contact centers when I can go straight to the source?"
Q: As a contact center leader, what makes a good workforce planning team?
The number one thing for me has always been the relationship with the business. I think the planning team works best when it is part of a cohesive group and everybody is talking about the business. Not their business, not each individual person's business, but the business, the enterprise, the operation.
When the planning team is in marketing meetings, sales meetings, and finance meetings, they can learn about the business and apply those learnings to how they forecast. Imagine you’re sitting in a sales meeting and realize there’s going to be a huge marketing initiative with 3 million emails going out that could generate an additional 15% contact rate. You need to know about these types of events and initiatives as a planner.
A good planning team is embedded in the entire enterprise and is close to the organization as a whole. Your team is feeding information to the business and the business is feeding information to you. Then you're both using those pieces of data to make dynamic moves that make the enterprise more responsive, efficient, and effective.
Q: How are Aspect’s Solution Architects shaping the customer experience?
Our Discovery Workshops are invaluable experiences. We partner with our customers during these free on-site visits with both an Account Director and a Solutions Architect, to learn about their culture, current environment and desired state, as well as their business challenges.
These workshops aren’t designed to immediately fix a problem, but to understand the customer strategy, their pain points, and their challenges—then we partner with them to create a bridge between where they are today and their aspirational goals of tomorrow.
Investing our time into our customers is a powerful way to engage with them. Showing our customers that we're committed to listening, providing recommendations, and developing a phased plan to help them reach their goals is key. It's an important step in building strong, engaging, and sustainable relationships.
Q: What are the most common pain points that emerge during these workshops?
That’s a tough question, it really depends on the environment and the organization. Each business has their own set of pain points and requirments to address these challenges. Can a product accurately forecast across multiple channels and across multiple skills? Is the tool flexible and can I experiment? Are there what if scenarios? How robust is automation? How easy is the product to use?
Requirements vary significantly between organizations, but at the end of the day, we want customers to fully utilize the system and implement all relevant use cases for their needs. And to not only feel confident and knowledgeable about the product, but also know how to maintain it.
Q: What's the most important skill an Aspect Solutions Architect or someone in a similar role should have?
Active listening is a critical skill. As Solutions Architects, we spend a lot of time listening, reframing what we thought we heard, and asking it back in the form of a question to the customer.
This does two things: One, it lets the customer know that we value their time and we are absolutely listening. Two, it validates that what we heard was correct. If it's not, now we've given the client an opportunity to help us better understand what they were saying and what they need.
Q: Having spent extensive time in contact centers, what's your perspective on balancing digital and human agents?
From a cost perspective, bots or digital agents are cheaper to implement, that’s the reality. But ultimately, if a business really wants to take care of their customers, you need to have an outlet to a live person. There are just some customers that will not talk to a bot. They're always going to want to talk to a person and they need that.
So our job is to create solutions that make it easier for that live agent to do their job. This includes automating processes and providing true self-service so agents don't have to ask their supervisor basic questions or wait for supervisor responses.
Investing in digital bots may be a good business decision for some organizations, but at the end of the day, there's still going to be a book of work that has to be handled by a human. If we can make workdays easier, it's a win for the agent, it's a win for the frontline supervisor, it's a win for the customer, and it's a win for the company.
Thanks for tuning in for another installment of “Ask Aspect.” We’ll be back again soon with more insights from our workforce veterans and leadership team. In the meantime, check out our other installments or our new employee highlight series, "Spotlight On," with the latest edition highlighting Aspect veteran our marketing operations maven, Beth Zindel.
