South Australia Water Corporation is a water utility wholly owned by the South Australian state government, providing fresh water and waste water services to South Australia's nearly 1.5 million citizens.
Founded in 1856, it's been around for a while.
As with many public utilities, call volumes can be wildly unpredictable with call types ranging from service requests and billing enquiries to emergencies, such as water main failures and sewer blockages.
SA Water sought to answer all calls to its customer service center within 20 seconds, and given the wide variety of calls it receives, "decided to seek a more systematic way to forecast call volumes and, more importantly, schedule staff to ensure it achieved its service level commitments," company officials said.
David Coombe, manager of SA Water's customer service center, said SA Water conducted a review of its business processes and procedures and identified several areas in need of improvement in the contact center, including the incumbent rostering process, which he described as cumbersome and error-prone.
So they picked GMT's workforce management software "because of how well its functional requirements closely matched the capabilities of GMT Planet's workforce optimization suite, as well as its client lifecycle methodology, SureServices," SA Water officials said.
"Under our old process, it took upwards of seven hours a week for our Team Leaders to generate a roster," Coombe said. "And fairness, time off and intraday management were quite a chore. Once we implemented GMT Planet, we generated rosters in 30 minutes, rather than seven hours, and had unprecedented visibility into agent availability and time off."
With GMT Planet, which is ideally suited to call centers of all types and sizes, "we are able to more fairly schedule shifts and improve the time off request and approval process," he noted, adding that these are now "automatically reflected in our rosters, and agents can access their roster from any computer with a browser."
To download a free customer case study and learn more about how GMT's workforce management software improved SA Water's operations, click here.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Patrick Barnard