BOULDER, Colo. - A scheduling tool that spits out seemingly nonsensical schedules has actually allowed the contact center at Elevations CU here to do more in less time–with 15% fewer full-time agents.
“The system has increased our operational efficiency, which has increased our service levels,” suggested Les Boothby, contact center and remote delivery manager at the $800-million CU. “An increase in service levels can increase member loyalty. The efficiencies and loyalty roll all the way out to the lenders, who have more referrals and more time to answer loan calls.”
In 2005, Elevations started using GMT Planet, a provider of workforce and cash management solutions, to schedule and forecast staffing needs for telephone, e-mail, remote delivery, and loan and member service representatives.
GMT pulls call trends and historical data, such as the amount of talk time, times of the year, seasons and days of the week, and plots them against algorithms to forecast an optimal weekly schedule.
GMT may not deliver what an experienced contact center manager expects, said Boothby. “The hardest part in learning to use the software is to let the system do its job and trust the data,” he explained. “When you’re used to scheduling manually or using Microsoft Excel, the GMT schedules don’t look like they should make sense.”
At first, the call center team was wary of the schedules produced by GMT, which arranged for breaks and lunches at atypical hours.
But Boothby used GMT’s “extensive” reporting capabilities to prove to the staff just how much the tool had increased their productivity and service levels.
Call staff used to answer less than 80% of all calls in fewer than 30 seconds. But–just by telling the staff the right time to take breaks and the right time to be on the phones–GMT has slowly increased that service level to 85% of all calls answered in 20 seconds or less, said Boothby.
“GMT empowered the staff and improved scheduled adherence,” said Boothby. “Staff knows to follow the optimized schedule and notify us with exceptions. They’ve learned that by trusting the schedule, they can provide better service to members and work better with each other.”
Call staff is more productive, Boothby continued. When Elevations launched GMT, the credit union wanted to make sure that staff was on the phone helping members at least 75% of their scheduled work time.
The CU quickly surpassed that benchmark, operating at 90% productivity within six months. What’s more, the increased productivity allows the contact center to operate with just 18 FTEs, down from 25 FTEs in 2004, Boothby added.
Despite the value that a CU such as Elevations gets from GMT, less than 20% of all credit union and bank branches use workforce optimization (WFO) technology, according to Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Saddletree Research.
“It’s amazing to me–I’m part of different e-mail groups, and so many people at other credit unions are always asking if WFO truly provides any benefits,” said Boothby. “I tell them that GMT is easy to use and the overall quality is phenomenal.”
Manual scheduling is a hard habit to break, he added. “People have been making their own schedules for so long, but you have to wonder, are they efficient?”
Last year, Elevations call staff answered 266,000 calls, down 9,000 calls from 2006. “As we offer more remote delivery services, the number of calls comes down,” said Boothby. (c) 2008 The Credit Union Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.cujournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
