A recent white paper from Alcatel Lucent (News - Alert), titled “Five Steps to an Employee Effectiveness Model: Improve Business Results with Engaged Employees,” takes a look at implementing an Employee Effectiveness Model that brings together “a host of capabilities under a single umbrella to align training, job assignment, job scheduling, quality assurance and career development so that your workforce has the right skills to provide stellar service” to customers.
Yes, your organizations might already have some legacy systems in place for quality assurance, workforce management, coaching, e-learning and customer feedback, but as the paper demonstrates, such systems are usually passive and often siloed, and don’t provide the sort of benefits you hoped they would when you bought them.
The paper breaks it down into five steps to help companies build a more engaged, efficient and effective organization – “one with happier employees, more satisfied customers and a much healthier corporate balance sheet.”
Step one – plan. Not all communications channels are equal, nor do they require the same skill sets for successful customer interactions. A good Employee Effectiveness Model recognizes this, and can forecast and schedule employees based on actual trends across a variety of channels.
Step two – deliver. Measure employee skill levels from the first day a new hire walks through the door to the last day he walks out.
Step three – control. Once an organization has put a plan in place and defined key performance indicators, an Employee Effectiveness Model will ensure that organizations are meeting service level agreements.
Step four – analyze. Know what skills individual employees do or don’t possess to route customers to the right customer service representative.
Step five – develop. Once skill gaps and best employee practices have been identified, organizations can address these areas by creating, scheduling and managing custom-designed training and coaching programs at the most convenient times.
While some workforce optimization approaches provide assessment and analysis tools, they can lack the ability to control and manage all processes from one centralized location. Alcatel Lucent’s Genesys (News 
- Alert) Workforce Optimization is designed to allow businesses to flourish amidst increasing competition and volatile markets by breaking down silos and making information available to everyone who needs it, among other priorities.
This goes a long way towards helping you develop the employee talent you need.
Click here to read the white paper in full.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by
Jennifer Russell
