I feel like I’ve been doing this for a very long time. For over 30 years, in many different incarnations, I’ve supported different organisations achieve their operational objectives. Where does the time go!

During this time, the key operational focus has almost always been about doing more with less, has often been about improving the customer experience and more recently has included finding ways to improve employee engagement.

Technology has often been seen as an inhibitor. A necessary evil. A large cost that redirects your teams from important business as usual activity and adds a level of complexity to your operations model.

Most of the technology investments made by organisations during my time in business operations have been behind a 5 - 7 year IT investment lifecycle, have been selected by an IT stakeholder and have a business case aligned to a risk mitigation benefit – hardly inspiring or innovative and rarely aligned to the business goals of these teams.

This lack of business engagement and IT/Business integration is what has driven the model and focus of my teams consulting philosophy. We help people to leverage technology because – traditionally it’s been done badly and its often very complicated.

I’ll start with some important context. I’m not a digital native. In fact, my teenage children often shake their head and mutter under their breath “we can’t believe you work in IT mum!” I’m more a big picture person – not really interested in how something works but why you should do it.

Our typical customer is a business with a weary team of talented experts. They are often charged with finding efficiencies in a budget that’s already in deficit. That means they need to deliver results with less people, less training, less investment and less hope of success.

In Australia, the ‘Business case’ approach to investment (which is a great financial governance model) can limit an organisations ability to innovate and invest unless that business is a large enterprise with obvious economies of scale to generate a clear return on investment. As our biggest spend tends to be on people, this is normally where benefits are claimed and of course the cycle its perpetuated.

But recently, it feels like something has changed.

We are seeing a big change in the way that business’ consume technology and the clear benefits to business when they select technology that is focused on the business user experience. The advent of Cloud and the explosion of ‘Software as a Service’ capability means that there have never been as many business centric, flexible, affordable and viable ways to leverage technology to deliver value to your business.

So, as someone who doesn’t want to understand how it works, just what it does, this is a really exciting time. Our customers are trialling, adopting and innovating with technology solutions like never before.

That’s why we understand the real business value of Cloud based Workforce Management software.

At a high level, these ticks so many of our boxes as a technical enabler to meet your key business operations challenges.

• It’s cloud – No need for large capital investment and IT driven infrastructure programs. Commercial flexibility is a key benefit of cloud.
• It’s an Opex financial model – Our customers can often fund out of their existing operational budgets
• Many of them are Australian innovators – Local support and expertise and the opportunity to be part of the product roadmap conversation .
• They have been built during a digital age - From inception – they have ibeen built to cater to a multichannel, mobile and multi dimensional workforce – many of the traditional providers focus on voice and provide multichannel and back-office work arounds.
• They are built for a business user - It is a tool that is intuitive and can be driven by a business expert with no requirement for days of detailed training enablement. I know, I can use it!
• They are affordable and financially beneficial – No longer are Workforce Management tools the exclusive domain of the Enterprise. The business case is easy to justify. Some benefits in moving to a next generation WFM platform are outlined below. In reality, for new users of a WFM solutions we often see significantly higher improvements :
• Reductions in overstaffing of between 5% – 20%
• Reductions in overtime of between 5% – 20%
• Reductions in agent turnover/churn of between 3% – 20%
• Improvements in customer experience, effort and engagement metrics
• Back Office optimisation of up to 20% capacity release and 15% productivity release

Our customers need to be competitive to survive. The modern, Workforce Management tool is a necessity for any business operations team that supports their business’s goals to grow and prosper.

It’s never been easier for us to identify a quick win or an area of focus for business optimisation. The right Workforce Management tool will be an investment you will not regret.