"Having no visibility into our outsource partners left us extremely vulnerable and unable to see any potential hotspots. Now we have a 2-week intraday view across all business units, allowing us to slide shifts or assign overtime well in advance of a problem." - Andrew Hyde, Vodafone | |
Benefits:
Vodafone in the United Kingdom is part of the Vodafone Group, which provides a full range of mobile telecommunications services, including voice and data communications, to over 100 million customers across the world. The Group has interests in 27 countries and Partner Networks in a further 27 countries with almost all their mobile subsidiaries operating under the familiar 'Vodafone' brand name. Business Challenges "Originally, we didn't have flexible shifts and all of our teams were on fixed rotations created in spreadsheets, which meant we were vulnerable to changes in call pattern arrival. Also in our credit centers, we could only do outbound dialing in periods when the shifts and availability dictated," says Andrew Hyde, planning manager at Vodafone. "At the time, there was little use of virtual routing, which could mean low service levels in one center with availability in another. We were also unable to have any view of how our outsource partners were contributing on an intraday basis. Overtime was tracked manually by team managers and reported on timesheets, resulting in a heavy workload for supervisors and the payroll department." Effective In-House And Outsource Resource Sharing Internally, agent schedules are built using a bidding system together with a process that takes into account historical working times to ensure fairness. Agents control their holiday booking directly through TotalView WebStation, which has reduced the strain on Vodafone's workforce planning specialists. By building a connection to its outsourcing partners' ACDs through TotalView SmartSync,Vodafone is also able to build a complete and instant picture of agent availability everywhere in its customer contact organization, both within the company's four walls and at the outsourced sites. Now plans can be adjusted with as little as 30 minutes notice in order to account for any marked shortfalls or surpluses in contact center resources. Instead of managing overtime by hand, Vodafone now uses automated database scripts to quickly extract all overtime and shift premium exceptions, by coded reason, into a single file which payroll can expedite, a 20-minute process for just one member of staff. Better Agent Schedule Adherence Vodafone also got its desired drop in inefficiency, a reduction of more than 50 percent down to just 13 percent of the overall schedule. "This has resulted in direct cost savings and improved service levels," Hyde says. "We are also able to target our outbound agents to the prime outbound times for dialing. With this, we hope to improve our connect rate by 30 percent." Flexible shifts have greatly improved service level performance as well, with a running record of 8 straight months on target even with a reduction in the number of full-time agents. "We wanted to introduce flexible shifts because we knew it would increase our scheduling efficiency. But we were worried that the change would reduce adherence," commented Hyde. "Using TotalView with RTA enabled us to achieve greater schedule adherence and scheduling efficiency." Insight Into Outsourced Operations Improved Customer Service |
About Call Yachol (CY):
A company providing contact center outsourcing in Israel that employs people with disabilites.
Published: Monday, December 25, 2006
1.) | CrankWheel CrankWheel Screen Sharing CrankWheel is an easy and simple screen sharing solution, made for the needs of salespeople and customer service agents. CrankWheel complements voice calls by adding visuals to ongoing calls. There is no need to get the customer off the phone, onto another platform. Agents share their screens by directing clients to a link that can be sent via SMS, email or simply spelled out. The client can enter on any device, mobile, desktop or tablet and enters the session instantly. There is no registration or download required by the client. Features: - Screen sharing - Agents can hand control over to the client - Warm lead capture widget that alerts the sales team instantly of an intere... (read more) |
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