Case study - ForecastPro

Workforce Management Helping AEG to Provide Better Service

Problem description

Know-how is required

The MCC’s task is to cover the replacement parts business, the technical hotline (ProfiLine, i.e. technical assistance for consumers or retailers) and the Consumer Care department (pre-sales and after-sales service by the AEG direct team). The staff consists of specialists who are trained at regular intervals. The MCC service, which places a strong focus on knowledge and proficiency, is very popular with customers. Each week, the centre handles more than 14,000 calls, 500 to 700 e-mails and about 2,500 faxes. Both the first-level and the second-level support sections handle calls and written correspondence, with calls always taking higher priority. The second-level support is concerned mostly with technologically more complicated issues and complaints that cannot be settled at the first level. Calls are distributed by an Ericsson telephone system that has been configured to prioritise calls.

The MCC finally decided to implement the InVision workforce management (WFM) solution to optimise staff schedules in an employee-friendly manner. “We chose the InVision Enterprise WFM because it is perfectly suited to meet the complex challenges the MCC is facing. Our objectives were to obtain higher scheduling accuracy, spend less time scheduling, tailor the schedules to the requirement, take into account employees’ skills, and make the workflows more employee-friendly,” says Rainer Lindner, director of MCC.

In the summer of 2003, AEG’s domestic appliances branch, AEG Hausgeräte GmbH, founded the Multimedia Communication Center (MCC), the goal being to improve customer service. The MCC is a Nuremberg-based consolidation of the 6 smaller call centres that AEG Hausgeräte GmbH used to operate up to this point. The new location posed new challenges for staff planning: For a staff of now 90 agents, the existing, Excel-sheet-based solution would have made staff planning too time-consuming and inaccurate. Besides, the organisation wanted to become capable of taking into account employees’ working hour preferences.

Project description

Scheduling in only a few steps

The scheduling procedure is based on the data made available by the call distribution system, i.e. the number and duration of calls. Tasks that are not related to call-handling are taken care of whenever the call volume permits it. Written correspondence work is distributed to selected employees and serves as a filler to ensure that all employees have an equal workload and are constantly productive.

From the historical data, the InVision Enterprise WFM derives the future call volume, inferring from it the future staff requirement and generating shifts that will ensure coverage of the requirement. Factors such as skills, working hour accounts, team structures, and legal, union-negotiated, or contractual regulations are taken into direct account to ensure that an employee’s shift always complies with the working hours regulations that apply to him or her. Employees manage their working hours in an interactive calendar, where they can also enter working hour preferences. The likelihood of an employee receiving the shift he or she signed up for is higher the fewer colleagues signed up for the same shift. If neither the primary shift request nor the alternative shift request can be fulfilled, the software will randomly assign any shifts that so far no employees have been placed on. That way, working hours are distributed equally among the staff.

In the MCC, each weekly staff schedule is generated and made available to employees four weeks in advance. This advance notice makes it easy for employees and planners to plan ahead: Capacities can be rationed out better and reallocated if needed, since changes can always be announced in due time.

Integrated Solution

InVision Enterprise WFM links up perfectly with the other call centre tools utilised by MCC. Standard interfaces to systems for human resources, time management, payroll accounting etc. make sure that data streams are transferred quickly and without interruption. As a result, the staff schedules that the system produces are not only completely in tune with the staff requirement; they also comply with all technological, legal and financial conditions prevalent in the MCC’s environment.

Results

Less Time and Money Spent On Scheduling

Since the InVision Enterprise WFM provides the user with easily operated control levers at each stage of the scheduling, each step can be repeated should the requirement deviate from what was originally predicted. All in all, scheduling has become easier and faster. Many scheduling steps are now launched by mouse click and use a fraction of the time that the earlier, manual approach used to take. Moreover, the system can be operated quite easily even by employees who so far have had little contact with IT. That applies both to the general staff and the planners themselves. The latter now grasp and control all processes at one glance. Manuals and the online help provide planners with practical and easily accessible assistance.

“Staff scheduling in the MCC has become much more efficient thanks to InVision,” says Maria Mamalougos, one of the team leaders in the MCC. “In addition, this solution has made a significant contribution toward the successful introduction of flexible working hours. Thanks to flexible shifts whose position in the day is determined solely by our requirement for staff, we achieve optimal coverage at all times.”

Compared to the former, decentralised scheduling approach, the time and money spend on scheduling has been cut by over 90 percent. Six supervisors, i.e. one per site, each took an entire day to schedule that location’s staff, while now, for 90 agents, two team leaders take turns in producing an entire month’s schedule, using no more than 2 days each turn. Scheduling and controlling are now performed simultaneously without interfering with day-to-day business.

Service objectives achieved

Scheduling accuracy has increased significantly since the old manual scheduling approach made way for InVision. Down-to-the-minute forecasts ensure that staff placement is targeted precisely to the actual workload at any time. The service level target to accept all calls within 30 seconds and to reply to all written correspondence (fax, mail or e-mail) within 24 hours has been met. “Thanks to this precise scheduling approach, overtime or understaffing issues are practically a thing of the past,” says Artur Kisser, team leader and planner. “Staff scheduling with InVision has helped to ensure that we can cope with new tasks such as the technical hotline and Consumer Care while sticking with the same number of employees as before.”

As an added bonus, employees are more satisfied, and thus more motivated, now that they can get involved in the planning process. This increase in motivation is reflected immediately by the quality of our customer service and the degree of customer satisfaction.

Return on investment after just one year

“Thanks to InVision Enterprise WFM, we have achieved our goals with regard to scheduling within just one year,” says Rainer Lindner. “We were able to completely tailor our services to our customers’ needs.”

Through workforce management, the MCC has become able to take full advantage of the capacities it has. Costly understaffing is avoided, as are extra expenses for overtime. All in all, each employee has become more productive, as he or she is consistently assigned an optimised workload. More calls and written requests can now be pursued up to full resolution of the problem. In addition, the automation has allowed the scheduling process to become much faster than before. “We have reached a full return on our investment in InVision Enterprise WFM within 12 months,” says Lindner.