Customer Success
| TravelCLICK | | Print | |
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TravelCLICK’s call center provides reservation sales and customer service resources to the hotel industry. Operating multiple call centers around the world, operational efficiency is mission critical for TravelCLICK. Due to the company's diverse client base, its Calgary, Canada-based contact center handles hundreds of different types of calls each and every day. Over time, the challenges of staffing agents to meet so many different needs became too much for the company's spreadsheet-based approach to agent scheduling and management. In response, TravelCLICK adopted the IEX® TotalView® workforce management system. "Prior to installing TotalView, we were unable to match our forecast and staff requirements to schedules with anything but a gross approximation," says Jeff Bzdawka, Chief Operating Officer for TravelCLICK. “Implementing TotalView and being able to forecast and schedule to customer demand enabled us to improve our processes and our service level to our customers.” Improvements in Agent Efficiency Boost Customer ExperienceAlthough TravelCLICK had made attempts to track adherence internally using the resources at its disposal, the process required several hours and required manual adjustments. Furthermore, lunches and breaks were not generally scheduled, so measurements of overall adherence were subject to interpretation and judgment, not hard facts.“Implementing TotalView and then gaining the ability to access Adherence and Conformance reports was a turning point for us,” Bzdawka says. “It has allowed us to properly schedule breaks and lunches as well as revise the cause-and-effect process to meet our internal goal for agent adherence." “Implementing TotalView and then gaining the ability to access Adherence and Conformance reports was a turning point for us,” Bzdawka says. “It has allowed us to properly schedule breaks and lunches as well as revise the cause-and-effect process to meet our internal goal for agent adherence." TravelCLICK now uses 15-minute interval scheduling and uniform availability data, along with agent skills and preference consideration, to create its schedules. The TotalView shift templates make it easy to build the right schedule for both the needs of the call center and the individual agent. Breaks and lunches are now appropriately scheduled, rather than left up to individual discretion. The resulting gains in agent effectiveness helped TravelCLICK realize a 4 percent gain in occupancy. Scheduling to requirement led directly to a service level gain and a drop in call abandonment. The detailed activity tracking and the ability to generate summarized activity reports for payroll have taken the costly and frustrating payroll errors out of the equation. Precise, Skill-Based Scheduling and Management GainsTravelCLICK's agents must be prepared for almost anything. Early attempts to schedule groups based on skills proved difficult without automation and precise analysis. With the aid of TotalView and the IEX training staff, TravelCLICK narrowed its relevant agent skill groups down to 17, which are now used to properly represent agent capability in the organization's seven shared contact groups.TotalView has also helped TravelCLICK maintain its commitment to minimum time between shifts, and has taken vacation planning from an activity requiring almost one staff-day per week of manual labor to an automated process. The management reporting tools provided by TotalView give TravelCLICK supervisors instant access to historical and intraday performance data, eliminating the need to comb through multiple spreadsheets in an attempt to reach conclusions about business performance. Better reporting helps TravelCLICK improve decision making and overall operational performance. "Most reporting needs are satisfied by simply running a single report from TotalView. Management is now able to focus on serving customers, not collecting data and developing reports,” Bzdawka says. Taken as a whole, the gains in scheduling accuracy and adherence along with improvements in operational performance enabled TravelCLICK to make substantial gains in the first year of TotalView use. Benefits
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