PointCompany has increased its sales and customer satisfaction through flexible workforce planning, using injixo WFM.
PointCompany is a Swiss service provider in the field of dialogue marketing, with locations in Baden, Basel and Geneva.
The challenge
The company’s contact centre in Basel employs 100 agents offering around-the-clock inbound services on behalf of about 170 different companies.
While there are some key customers, there are also many small and medium-sized customers for whom they provide various services, such as mail order hotlines, customer care and help desk services, as well as telephone exchange facilities.
On average, the staff take more than 127,000 calls a month in four different languages: English, German, French and Italian. There are also other customer interactions via email, webchat and social media, as well as online communities management.
In order to always have the right number of employees with the required qualifications under these complex conditions, detailed workforce planning is essential.
Before the company decided on injixo, workforce planning was undertaken on Excel spreadsheets. However, this did not reflect the complexity of the business.
Planning was very time consuming, inefficient and did not provide adequate cover, as the forecast calculation (which was developed from the telephony data of the ACD system) could not be systematically brought in line with the scheduling data.
The solution
The management of the Basel contact centre required a professional workforce management solution (WFM) to resolve these issues. Cost consciousness was key in the selection of the new planning tool, first and foremost.
Therefore traditional, expensive licensing models were excluded from the outset and the new solution was examined as a cost-effective alternative cloud solution.
As a SaaS (Software as a Service), injixo provides the ability to flexibly adjust needed capacity and monthly usage fees for the actual business needs. In addition to the monthly fees per employee, there are no further expenses such as software licences, expensive server hardware, a large implementation project, continuous IT support or ongoing maintenance.
A number of other defining factors influenced the decision to select the cloud solution, such as:
- Inbound and outbound planning – Although only inbound activities are planned initially, the new solution should also enable efficient outbound planning. In the near future, all Basel employees will be scheduled with the solution, which requires the integration of outbound activities into overall planning.
- Employee engagement – Agents use the Me self-service portal any time and anywhere to access their work schedules and vacation requests, even when using their own smartphones or tablets. This makes it easy for employees to use, and vacation request forms are no longer required.
- Intraday control – With the help of Act, shift leaders in Basel can monitor the service level at any time. If there are acute shortages, for example due to unplanned absences, this can be captured in real time and countermeasures taken. Therefore the ongoing operation of the contact centre can be ensured throughout the day.
- Forecast functionalities – Based on the forecast capabilities of the solution, the historical data from the connected ACD can be integrated seamlessly into the WFM process. So with demand-oriented planning that covers the volume of work as efficiently as possible, the company is therefore in a position to supply high-quality forecasts to their customers.
The results
The company has achieved a number of positive results:
- Reduced waiting time – Agent efficiency has measurably increased. The waiting time, i.e. the time in which the operators are waiting for incoming calls or requests through other channels, has been reduced from 35% to 32%. The goal is to continue to reduce the waiting time, through consistent planning refinement, to reach a value below 30%.
- Efficient schedules through multi-skill planning – The replacement of labour-intensive, manual planning in Excel spreadsheets, through staff planning that supports multi-skilling, has enabled the company to improve the quality of their planning process.
- Increased customer satisfaction – The increased forecast accuracy and service level compliance has improved the satisfaction of clients.
- Increased employee motivation – Through the online features of the Me agent self-service portal, commitment has visibly increased. Increased employee satisfaction is also based on the fact that employees’ working time preferences can be easily taken into consideration in the planning.
“With injixo we have already reduced our agent waiting times by 3% – that means pure Sales for us,” said Nicole Steimle, Call Centre Manager at PointCompany Basel.
For more information about injixo, visit their website.
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 15th Apr 2015 - Last modified: 18th Dec 2018
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