Customer Success
Barclays Bank | Print |
British financial giant Barclays Bank PLC has taken its workforce planning to a new level of sophistication by using the IEX® TotalView® Workforce Management system to support not just individual schedule bidding but aggregated team-based schedule bids.

The team approach gives Barclays additional scheduling flexibility and an expanded range of choices for resource planning while supporting service level consistency and reliability expected of its 4,000 agents. "With very few amendments to IEX TotalView, we were able to provide team-based scheduling within the IEX TotalView system’s existing schedule bidding option," says Chris Lindley, virtual contact center planning manager for Barclays.

The decision to adopt team-based scheduling was motivated by agent preferences and business direction. "The vast majority of departments requested to be scheduled with intact teams, even to the level that agents’ lunch and 15-minute breaks were scheduled together," Lindley says.

Barclays Bank has been using TotalView since 1999. For a time, the bank’s dedicated workforce management specialists used a manual, spreadsheet-driven process to re-assign teams to matching schedules. "It was a highly time-intensive process of manual changes, with a great deal of exporting of intraday material into spreadsheets for analysis. The system has made us much more efficient. Essentially, the same workload is being completed with 20 percent of the initial resources.”

Automated Team Scheduling

With IEX TotalView, team scheduling of flexible agents is automated, ensuring accuracy and effective integration with non-standard/fixed working arrangements. The IEX TotalView system allows Barclays to set up schedule exceptions such as bank holidays. Schedule generation then proceeds normally, with the resulting team schedules approved by the workforce management staff. From there, Barclays assigns agents to team schedules according to their agent data profile. The resulting team schedules are released to the IEX TotalView WebStation™ ScheduleViewer for seamless, automated communication.

Increased Employee and Customer Satisfaction

Combining team scheduling with a colleague-centric approach to Flexible Working has helped Barclays strike a balance between employee and customer satisfaction. The new approach allows Barclays to generate acceptable team schedules for departments while also supporting more dynamic team configurations and preferences. "Schedule bidding allows accurate modelling to demand, and the intact team-based scheduling has helped improve support and motivation for agents, which pays off in their interactions with our customers," Lindley says.

Reduced Scheduling Exceptions

Team scheduling has made tasks such as exception handling much easier at the point of Schedule Generation. Now exceptions are assigned to a single team for entry instead of being split across multiple agents. Barclays estimates this has cut agent exception instances by over 90 percent.

Tailored Staff Plans to Demands

Barclays also increased the organization’s flexibility by using a mix of live and theoretical scheduling models to balance agent preferences against customer demands. “By importing a mixture of live and theoretical schedule examples into TotalView, we’re able to produce a wide range of staff plans and scenarios that can be tailored to fit both employee and customer demands,” Lindley says.

The schedule modelling process and team bidding have also made Barclay’s use of offshore resources more effective and have improved site and expansion planning. “TotalView supplies us with the most accurate portrait possible of current and future demand versus scheduling supply,” Lindley says.

Client Profile:

Sector: Financial Services
Contact Types: Voice
Sites:  Nine sites across two continents
Site Locations: Coventry, Liverpool, Manchester, Sunderland, Cardiff, Clacton, Leeds, Mumbai & Chennai
Contact Volume: 35 Million
Agents: 4,000
Type of ACD: Symposium, Rockwell

Barclays serves approximately 14 million consumers and nearly 600,000 small businesses across the United Kingdom.

Benefits

  • Gained Team Scheduling Benefits
  • Bolstered Agent Performance and Customer Satisfaction
  • Reduced Schedule Exceptions by Over 90 Percent
  • Increased Scheduling Efficiency
  • Improved Visibility into Offshore and Expansion Requirements
“TotalView supplies us with the most accurate portrait possible of current and future demand versus scheduling supply.”
Chris Lindley, Barclays