Customer Success
| Outbound Operation for Large Retail Financial Services Center | | Print | |
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Some companies look at workforce management solely as a solution for inbound call centers, without taking the next step and applying those same best practices to outbound operations. This financial services division of this retail company has enjoyed improved scheduling management as well as rising adherence and agent satisfaction by introducing the IEX® TotalView® Workforce Management system into its outbound collections environment. "We purchased TotalView for the inbound call center, but we have embraced TotalView to create a workable solution," says a corporate representative. With over 450 agents, the company saw a clear opportunity to improve the consistency and clarity of its scheduling rules for all agents, regardless of call specialty. Before TotalView, agents filed exception requests with leaders, who in turn sent approved requests on to a special collections scheduling group. The large volume of requests and complicated manual process involved in reconciling the requests sometimes resulted in granting too many requests, resulting in an understaffing condition. The entire process was a disproportionate burden for the scheduling staff, eating up as much as 85 percent of the workforce management specialists' time. To solve the problem, the group turned to the TotalView Webstation Plus and Time Off Manager applications, giving agents immediate feedback on exception requests, rather than the lag of 24 hours or more on manual requests. Exception availability is presented up to 6 months into the future, helping agents better manage their own schedules before creating conflicting requests. An automated waiting list makes distribution of time off on heavily demanded days more equitable and completely closed days are now managed automatically and in an immediately visible fashion, rather than manually maintained on a physical board. Schedule trading has become more precise, as agents are now only presented with offers that are relevant and from a matching department and job function. The resulting visibility and ease of use for agents has contributed to a 4 percent gain in adherence, and the improved visibility for management has enabled the vast majority of the collections groups to begin using agent availability as a review and reward criteria. In addition, the resulting gains from self-service and self-determination have considerably reduced the strain on the workforce management group, taking them out of a firefighting mode and allowing them to focus more on maintaining a high operating standard while protecting workplace quality. "Webstation Plus and Time Off Manager have greatly reduced the number of requests the Collections Scheduling Services team receives, and this in turn has allowed the group to move forward with offering additional value-added services for the collections department," says a corporate representative. On the senior management side, the TotalView implementation has enabled the group to create a forecasting tool using the TotalView personnel planner capability, providing more precise and accurate estimates of necessary workforce growth to business group heads. Looking ahead, the collections group plans to further expand its use of forecasts and full time employee (FTE) estimators, base more marketing and staffing decisions on observed daily traffic, and introduce variable scheduling and lunch/break planning to make the collections group more effective. "Over the past three years the collections scheduling team has become a valuable part of the collections group, and the implementation of TotalView into our collections environment has allowed us to make a steady stream of changes and improvements for the organization," says a corporate representative. Client Profile:Company: RetailSector: Financial Services Contact Types: Inbound and outbound voice Site Locations: two Agents: 450+ Benefits
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