The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

"As an outsource call centre provider, people and technology are our business. Without either of these properly in place, we don't have a business at all. GMT Planet™ is specifically designed to get people in the right place at the right time.

This solution is a strategic tool that supplies us with significant benefits today and will scale as our business continues to grow." Martin Bill, Joint Managing Director, Contact 1-2-1

The Situation:
Contact 1-2-1 provides a 24 hour, 7 day a week outsourced call centre operation for Australian companies. With 230 operational call centre seats in Adelaide, South Australia and Southport, Queensland, it offers a complete outsource solution for companies seeking to work with an external specialist call centre provider. Contact 1-2-1 provides a host of multi-media services including inbound and outbound phone, fax, email, mail and 2-way SMS across a range of services including customer service, telesales, telemarketing, surveys and back office work.

In the first two and a half years since the company started in November 2002, Contact 1-2-1 had grown from one employee to over 100 people. The time-consuming processes involved in rostering this number of staff and keeping track of their shift patterns was becoming increasingly complex. With growth and diversity in inbound call demand patterns for a number of different services and customers, Contact 1-2-1 wanted to improve its rostering processes to better predict and respond to this demand. Combine these issues with the multiple logistics behind payroll, billing, training and purchases for the growing number of staff, and it became clear that Contact 1-2-1 had outgrown its previously effective processes and tools for resource management.

With an aggressive corporate growth strategy in place, Contact-1-2-1 was keen to proactively combat any issues that would limit expansion. Consequently, it was important to not only find a workforce management solution that could bring together all the processes involved in managing staff shift patterns and the associated back office logistics, but also a tool that could grow with the organisation and easily accommodate potential challenges and opportunities over the next five years.

The Solution:
Following an extensive evaluation of the market, Contact 1-2-1 selected GMT Planet because it provided the best value-for-money solution, offering an easy-to-implement tool that could meet its needs now and in the foreseeable future, supported by a knowledgeable and professional sales and implementation team.

"GMT Planet has proven success in call centres across the globe," said Martin Bill, Joint Managing Director at Contact 1-2-1. "In addition to meeting our workforce management issues, we also wanted the ability to feed historical data from and interface with our Noble Systems PABX/Dialer. GMT's flexibility meant we could easily adapt this to fit our business in a cost-efficient, yet reliable way."

Bill continued, "The solution stood out because of its powerful and accurate forecasting options and its ability to roster staff based on availability, skills and proficiency. We are in the business of providing the right numbers of the right sort of people when our customers require them to be available. We have a responsibility to our staff to train them to meet these requirements and GMT Planet has enabled us to match these sometimes competing priorities relatively easily to ensure that we deliver the services and service levels our customers expect of us."

GMT was involved from the outset - from the initial discovery session, through pre-implementation and installation, to training staff. This involvement led to a realisation by the Contact 1-2-1 team that there was no situation in its business that could not be handled by GMT Planet. "Rather than work around the software, it became evident that we would not need to change our operations to suit GMT," said Bill. "That said, the suggestions and options provided to us by GMT enabled us to 'think outside the squares we had built' and use much of the functionality available in GMT to enhance our operations."

Benefits:
Although Contact 1-2-1's expectations were to purchase a workforce management tool, the GMT Planet solution is now a Human Resource Management tool, supporting the organisation's finance team through providing discernable information on payroll and customer billing. "Without these two factors in place – the ability to pay people correctly, as well as being able to be paid by our customers correctly – our business and its growth would have been limited by the processes in place to deal with these aspects," confirms Bill.

Since completing implementation in July 2005, Contact 1-2-1 has seen demonstrable return on investment in terms of reducing both human and operational time to complete activities such as rostering, managing payroll and improving accuracy of billing.

Forecasting and scheduling staff, including the time taken to manage changes to rosters has decreased by 80% since implementing GMT, while the accuracy and timeliness of this activity has increased by 20% due to the elimination of manual paper-based processes. Martin Bill estimates this has benefited the company by in excess of $40,000 pa in time alone.

He continues, "Similar figures exist in terms of improvements to management of payroll, with a decrease of 80% in time spent preparing and running payroll, while accuracy of information has improved by 20%. Considering the human and operational costs of both these aspects, this alone would justify the investment in GMT. In dollar terms, this represents a saving of $25,000. In addition, the ability to more accurately bill customers has resulted in $100,000 flowing straight into the net profit line."

GMT has also helped to support and simplify adding new and changing staff into its complete Human Resource Management tool. The resulting affects of this, in terms of hours as well as accuracy, is also substantial representing a saving of approximately $10,000 pa.

Bill concludes, "We have a true business partnership with GMT. Given the critical nature of the benefits that the GMT solution provides our business, it is heartening to have a key supplier that understands what we are trying to achieve, and who is more than capable and willing to offer us every available support and assistance in doing so."