Customer Success
American Electric Power | Print |
ImageOhio-based American Electric Power (AEP) generates the largest amount of electricity in America, owning and operating more than 38,000 megawatts of generating capacity. The company's 800 customer service agents serve as key contributors behind its success, fielding more than 14 million customer calls per year.

AEP's rapid growth was further boosted when it merged with powerhouse Central and Southwest Corporation (CSW). Yet with the benefits of the union came the challenge of streamlining the processes in the company's' seven contact centers.

Each of the centers approached scheduling and forecasting from a different perspective. Some were using spreadsheets. Others relied on workforce management software requiring multiple servers that were costly to purchase and difficult to maintain. Neither option provided an affordable, efficient remedy for directing the newly combined operations.

AEP turned to Richardson, Texas-based IEX for answers. The IEX team showed AEP how a central server could support all seven of its call centers, allowing them to run the most efficient forecasting and scheduling scenarios possible. The implementation, completed in 2000, delivered immediate results.

"Prior to our TotalView® installation, we were always behind the eight ball in trying to anticipate how many agents to recruit for our peak season," said Aaron Johnson, supervisor-forecasting and scheduling.  "Now, with the help of TotalView's forecasting capabilities, we are able to predict staffing needs based on volume, average handling times, overhead, and occupancy trends, and can take a proactive approach in hiring and recruiting agents in preparation for peak call volumes."

Johnson credits TotalView's flexible scheduling capabilities with saving his company in excess of $50,000 through overtime avoidance alone.

"Prior to the TotalView installation, schedules were only issued once or twice per year. If a critical shift was vacated, it had to be filled with overtime until the shift could be filled," Johnson said. “After installing TotalView, we began producing weekly schedules four weeks in the future, which allows us to better adjust schedules to meet the needs of the business."

Not only has AEP benefited from the forecasting and scheduling capabilities TotalView delivers, but also from its savvy utilization of some of the system's optional features.

The software's skill scheduling feature, for example, allows AEP to substantiate the differences in average handling time (AHT) between its Spanish and English call volume. The skill scheduling solution also helps the company assign schedules based on productivity, rather than seniority, resulting in annual cost savings of over $500,000.

AEP supervisors are using Real-Time Adherence (RTA) to address agent adherence issues as they occur, resulting in an average conformance above 90 percent across all seven centers.

They depend on Vacation Planner to accurately track vacation and holiday balances and field time-off requests month's ahead of schedules. And they rely on the system's Agent WebStation feature to disseminate weekly schedules to agents electronically, eliminating past practices of manually distributing paper copies.

"The flexibility, efficiency and accuracy of the TotalView system has allowed us to satisfy the requests from our agents and our customers, while balancing the needs of the corporation," added Johnson.

For more information about American Electric Power, please visit their website .