Challenge: The company provides its 9 million members with a broad range of retail financial services, including: Mortgages, Savings, Current Accounts, Life Assurance and Investment Products, Personal Loans and Household Insurance. In September 1999, Nationwide first implemented Blue Pumpkin's resource planning software to schedule its 450 agents at sites based in both its call centres in Swindon and Northampton. | |
In 2001 the number of agents increased to 700 and were split into two main areas, telephone and Internet operations agents responsible for email enquiries. In offering the choice of channel to communicate with the call centres, Nationwide chose to keep these skills separate to ensure a consistent quality of service to its customers. The company, at this stage, does not have a requirement to forecast email agents, however Blue Pumpkin's Director - Enterprise is being used to record information on non-phone activity. This has proved invaluable during peak campaigns and highlights any shortfalls on additional staff needed in the call centre. Nationwide use Blue Pumpkin's Director - with Agent Adherence. To manage the 700 agents there are two team Senior Analysts: the Resourcing team works with 3 analysts who process approximately 200 agents each and the Co-ordinating team manages the process on an ongoing basis. They are responsible for overseeing the Meridian switch, observing the call centre 'floor' and for managing the overall service picture. In addition to the main areas of products to purchase, there are over 15 savings products. In all there are over 20 different skill sets required on the database – 8 into sales and 12 into service. They have been responding to customers via email through the Internet Banking service for 3 years. The service was relaunched in June 1999 with its first Internet focus on products and in May 2000 Nationwide improved two major areas: firstly they addressed the needs of existing customers by offering them a personalised service over the Internet and secondly focused on headline rates to encourage new business. This emphasis to prompt customers to call 'Nationwide Direct', coupled with Nationwide's recent change on stance regarding mortgages and the competitiveness of personal loan products, has led to a 65% increase in enquiries in 10 months, and through the combined sales & service divisions, inbound agents receive over 95,000 calls in a typical week. With this new demand placed on their call centres, Nationwide needed to know they had the correct number of agents with the right skills to be able to react, this scenario was perfect to put Blue Pumpkin to the test. Solution: "Since the implementation, we have been able to take on additional responsibilities as the software has saved us time in the routine scheduling jobs. Director - Enterprise has become a data source for many people who are not actively involved in the forecasting and scheduling for the call centres. A specific area highlighted is scheduled breaks that used to be an ad hoc manual process by the team, which was not able to reflect the skills of the agents. We are now able to monitor service level and schedules across the two sites which is crucial to a virtual operation to support decision being made dynamically, as is ensuring that both sites feel they have a sense of fair play – ie: one site doesn't always do the 'unsociable' shifts – both sites are working together to achieve the same goals." "In light of the recent expansion from 450 to 700 agents, Blue Pumpkin has proved to be a 'God-send'. Feedback from the Senior Analysts constantly assures me that the information we put in pays for itself many times over for the time it saves in forecasting and scheduling versus a manual operation. The key areas that benefit Nationwide are in exploiting the data – it's more than just a scheduling system – our challenge is to get even more from the software and maximise the information available." Results:
About Nationwide Building Society: About Blue Pumpkin |
Published: Friday, November 22, 2002
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