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The ways organizations engage with customers have changed dramatically in recent years, but the need to meet customers’ expectations is more urgent than ever. Customers are using many channels of engagement, some self-service and some involving direct contact with employees from almost any business group within the company – marketing, sales, finance and human resources as well as the contact center and agents based at home. Whatever the nature of the interaction, customers expect seamless navigation between channels and employees handling interactions. To meet these expectations, companies must have the right number of skilled employees available to handle all types of encounters.

Ventana Re­search under­took this bench­­­mark research to de­ter­­mine the attitudes, re­quire­­ments and plans of those who use workforce optimization systems in customer service environments and to identify the best prac­tices of organizations that are most ma­ture in it. We set out to examine both the common­­ali­ties and the qualities spe­cific to major in­dus­try sec­tors and across sizes of or­ga­ni­za­tions. We considered how organizations manage their customer service workforces, issues they encounter in the process and how their use of workforce optimization and related technology is evolving. We also compared the new research findings to those of research on the same topic we conducted in 2013 to discern changes and trends in workforce optimization since then. 

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