ACCENT Marketing Services, a provider of customer lifecycle management solutions, said that it has replaced its manual scheduling processes with the IEX (News - Alert) TotalView Workforce Management system, a NICE SmartCenter solution.
ACCENT Marketing Services operates a contact center with 250-plus agents for a Kingston, Jamaica-based telecommunications client, which was originally maintained in-house. The contact center had manual processes and systems.
To maximize the efficiency of the center, the company was seeking new processes. ACCENT selected IEX TotalView system and the IEX TotalView WebStation Plus Advanced features.
Company officials said that prior to deployment of IEX, ACCENT lacked the means for consistent measurement processes for performance indicators such as adherence and flexibility.
Using IEX TotalView system and WebStation Plus, ACCENT claims to have realized “tremendous” gains in agent adherence through automated schedule tracking and enforcement.
“Our process automation was minimal to none, as we took over this operation from the client,” said James Hurst, director of workforce management at ACCENT. He said that it used to take many hours to prepare schedules each week, and the company found regular issues with the delivery of appropriate updates to agents about schedule changes.
Hurst also said that with limited drivers for the agents to follow their schedules, it was hard to have any understanding of call volume to forecast until after the day was over.
“We were not able to ensure our agents provided accurate accounting of their logon time, so we were potentially missing opportunities to invoice the client for time we were paying out to agents,” he said.
Initially, readings from the IEX TotalView system reflected a less than 70 percent adherence rate under the old scheduling policies. Officials said that the figure has improved to 90 percent and growing today.
“We are now able to easily validate when agents are late, go offline without notice, or miss or are late to lunches and breaks,” Hurst said. “We use that information to coach agents about adherence and conformance.”
Through the WebStation Plus interface, the schedule changes are now handled. “Before, our managers could spend 4 to 6 hours per pay cycle just reviewing their agents’ time to ensure that they were there, properly denoting their time, and being paid for what they worked,” said Hurst.
He said that now, the agents can see their call stats and performance measurements online, and see immediately when schedule changes are made in the WebStation Plus Advanced feature.
“ACCENT has brought order to the busy contact center operations without breaking its operational budget,” said Hurst.
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Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anshu's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Michael Dinan
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