WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT IN THE JOURNEY TO WORKFORCE OPTIMISATION

Transcription

1 For UK-Based Contact Centres NCE3-WFM

2 CONTENTS Framing the context 3 Benefits of workforce management for contact centres 4 Workforce management - a detailed view 5 The business case for workforce management 7 Maximise the use of your WFM investment 13 How Netcall supports you to maximise your performance 16 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In this whitepaper, we focus on the way workforce management (WFM) underpins an effective journey to the evolving discipline of workforce optimisation (WFO). We consider that small to medium contact centres gain rapid tangible benefits when they deploy WFM early in the journey to WFO. A detailed view of WFM discusses the impact and importance of the fundamental functions of scheduling, forecasts, optimisation and agent adherence in delivering finely-balanced demand management and a rapid response to unforeseen or changing conditions. Any business case for workforce management will include hard or cashable benefits. In the illustrated example for a 50 agent contact centre, the estimated savings derived from shift pattern optimisation, overtime reductions and agent adherence measure eighty eight thousand pounds ( 88,400). There is a detailed comparison between resource management tasks being managed by spreadsheets or using a WFM solution, including data forecasts, forecast accuracy, schedule creation, agent interaction and adherence or the power-of-one. Additionally the possible impact of manual processing on proactive reporting and decision making and employment legislation compliance are explored. We explore soft efficiency mechanisms, which promote improved customer experience at the lowest possible cost, such as right person, right place, right time, first contact resolution and efficiency of management reporting and control. Detailed best practice collected from our experienced Professional Service Consultants provides support on how to maximise the use of your WFM investment including; benchmarking your progress to enable small regular efficiency gains, proactively managing and checking your levers of operation and using reserve working to readily respond to changing circumstances. Throughout we consider the impact that productive fairly-treated agents have on improving customer service and satisfaction. 2

3 FRAMING THE CONTEXT Capacity planning and performance quality are a journey 38% of UK contact centres 1 have yet to deploy workforce management (WFM) Realise rapid, tangible benefits from WFM Organisations face an ever more challenging world, where increasing customer expectations and demands shape their customer service responses. Typically the face of a customer-focused organisation, the contact centre is continually asked to do more with less, achieve results rapidly or find solutions to challenges in a way not yet achieved in their customer operations. CHALLENGES FACING CONTACT CENTRES 2 External Challenges Cloud-Based Deployments Social Media Mobile Devices Information Internal Challenges Reduce Operating Costs Reduce Customer Effort Improve Performance & Quality Reduce Average Handling Time Contact centre managers need to consistently balance rapid responsiveness to a fast-changing market with long term, sustainable improvement. They need assurance that their foundational technology and processes are solid and will deliver reliable real-time data accuracy to support their centre s capacity and performance quality. Workforce optimisation (WFO) is a growing industry concept of the convergence of cross-functional technologies that focuses on quality monitoring, workforce management, performance management and ecoaching 3. WFO aligns with the business strategy and ensures that the key organisational goals are clearly reflected in each of its metrics. There is no simple revolution. As we illustrate below, to be successful, WFO implementation is a step-by-step journey across people, processes and technology working to increase productivity and customer satisfaction. Starting the journey Forecasting and scheduling Surveying Performance management Strategic planning Recording Quality management ecoaching Interaction analytics Achieving WFO 3

4 Experience, however, shows that contact centres have traditionally purchased and deployed these technologies on a pick and mix basis as it suited their business needs. The journey to WFO starts with the deployment of any single technology. Each step plays an important role in delivering superior customer experience together with enhanced productivity and performance. BENEFITS OF WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT FOR CONTACT CENTRES WFM is a cornerstone of the WFO journey. Effective management of resources ensures that the right people are in the right place at the right time. Other aspects of WFO such as performance management and quality, support managers to ensure that their teams have the best possible skills to effectively resolve customer queries. Small to medium UK contact centres gain rapid tangible benefits when they deploy WFM early in the journey to WFO. On page 7 we detail the business case for workforce management; a review of the factors listed will assist contact centres to identify the specific benefits for their organisation. However, whilst WFM may be the beginning of the journey to WFO, it seems many UK contact centres have yet to turn up at the start line. According to ContactBabel 1, only 62% of UK contact centres use some form of workforce management system. That means that 38% are either considering an element of workforce management support or have yet to be convinced about its merits. (For a deeper understanding of the related technologies grouped within WFO read our associated whitepaper The journey to workforce optimisation ) 4

5 WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT - A DETAILED VIEW Finely-balanced demand management Rapid response to unforeseen or changing conditions High performance from fairly-treated agents The two fundamental activities performed within WFM solutions are forecasting and scheduling. The benefits from WFM accrue from accurately forecasting traffic levels across all available interaction channels, and then generating a reliable schedule of available agent resources that will best match with forecast demand. WFM focuses attention on effective resource management of the activities of each day across 15 minute intervals. Manual scheduling Agent scheduling Agent adherence Multichannel traffic forecasts Intraday optimisation What does WFM do? 1) Multichannel traffic forecasting Effective scheduling of agents is only possible using accurate forecasts. This is a much debated science. Using a solution that automatically takes data from multiple channels and systems, such as voice, and web chat, and applying sophisticated algorithms to properly allow for the impact of exceptional events, will deliver a meaningful forecast. The solution should manage the data from exceptional events and readjust future forecasts and so reduce the impact of unusual spikes. This will minimise the hidden impact of any historical exceptional event on future planning. Contact centre managers need future planning functionality to assess the impact of changing customer expectations and channel shift; this week, this month or for long-range forecasting. They often lack complete visibility into organisation-wide activities. Using estimates or scenario planning based on detail, such as a marketing launch, WFM users are able to plan for other events. Once the data is in the system the resource planner can perform what if analyses to understand the impact of any event or seasonal variations. Using spreadsheets requires the manual upload of the automatic contact distribution (ACD) and channel data which is time consuming and can be error-prone. It is unlikely that past exceptions will be appropriately weighted in future forecasts, which introduces a perpetual inaccuracy into the schedule. Similarly, what if analyses or long-range planning using contact volumes from multichannel interactions, can prove daunting and inconclusive. 5

6 2) Agent scheduling Agents perform best when they believe they are fairly treated. Relevant, fair schedules are easiest when they are generated from accurate forecasts. Rapidly finding the best fit of agent shifts to respond to forecast demand and deliver the best service level, is essential for any successful contact centre. Using an automated solution allows a planner to easily test different options and provide alternatives to match varying resource availability. 3) Intraday optimisation Typically, plans are disrupted by unforeseen events; managers need to be secure in their ability to rapidly respond to changing conditions, irrespective of the cause. Manual calculations of this nature are very time consuming and error prone due to the volume of data to be processed. Using a solution in place of a spreadsheet enables the comparison of real-time data against forecast, which provides a more accurate match of on-the-day agent availability. There are a number of tools that can be used to optimise resource availability to meet demand. These tools include adjusting breaks, lunches or training while ensuring compliance with the EU Working Time directives. Additionally more advanced strategies such as overtime, automation such as call back, remote workers or third party support can be tested. The solution will estimate and compare relative strategy costs to enable a full understanding of impact and cost efficiency. 4) Agent adherence Contact centre demand management is finely balanced, scheduling works to match demand with the number of agents required in 15 minute intervals. The removal of one agent can impact queue lengths and call abandonment. This effect is compounded when team leaders remove a team for meetings and training without using the scheduling tools, which can have a potentially devastating effect on service levels. A proactive contact centre will help every agent to understand the Power-of-One and the impact that their individual adherence decisions have on increasing colleague work load and reducing customer satisfaction. Agents who understand that even the removal of just one agent will have a profound impact on customer satisfaction are more likely to see the benefits of agent adherence compliance, which will improve teamwork and load balancing for everyone. The Power-of-One approach is highly effective and motivational. In comparison, the use of agent adherence as a punitive measure (sometimes called the big stick method) disheartens agents and does little to foster organisational success. 6

7 THE BUSINESS CASE FOR WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT WFM will improve customer experience, contributing to organisational success Effective WFM will improve agent efficiency WFM benefits contact centres from 30+ seats gaining productivity benefits 4 A WFM tool is considered a wise investment for any contact centre with 30 or more agents. The goal is to have the right people at the right time doing the required tasks with the desired quality. Manual workforce planning often results in higher-than-necessary operating costs due to poor deployment of resources to meet demand. This leads to over or under staffing, high agent idle time, missed service levels and high call abandonment, as well as excessive overtime costs, limited real-time visibility of performance, and time-consuming schedule administration. Any WFM implementation will deliver hard, soft and managerial efficiency benefits. We explore these benefits below. Considering the hard benefits Hard WFM benefits are those cashable returns gained from increasing agent effectiveness and call management. They include the saving from the automating of the necessary processes required to ensure that they are efficiently delivered. Hard benefits include: Improved shift patterns that accurately match demand Reduced agent idle time Achievement of service levels Reduction in call abandonment Reduction in overtime costs Improved agent adherence The opportunity for increased productivity through staff redeployment and time off in lieu More effective use of management time We explore a practical example of various hard or operational cost savings in the example calculation below: An illustrative case study to show the estimated value of the hard benefits: Case study example of a contact centre with 50 agents Average agent salary 18,000 (Based on ContactBabel mean average agent salary) Fully loaded agent salary bill 1,170,000 (This figure includes an estimated 30% of additional costs that are included to pay for statutory amounts) 7

8 The total estimated value saved ( 88,400) while using modest achievable improvements clearly demonstrates that collecting small efficiency savings from a number of areas will have a significant cumulative effect. Gartner 4 confirms that savings from WFM are typically between 5% and 15%. AREA FOR POTENTIAL SAVINGS Shift patterns optimisation Reduction in overtime costs Promoting agent adherence Savings on shift management ESTIMATED SAVINGS THAT CAN BE MADE 5% to 10% of total wage bill 5% estimate improvement 10% of current budget If overtime is 10% of wages 10% of overtime 5 to 15 minutes per agent per day 7 estimate minutes, or 5.83 hours or 1½% of any day 5 to 10 minutes per agent per week ESTIMATED RESULTANT SAVINGS FOR A 50 SEAT CONTACT CENTRE 58,500 11,700 18,200 Productivity benefit Total estimated value of hard savings on agent costs 88,400 Exploring the detail of the above-mentioned hard efficiency mechanisms Workforce management solutions automatically collect data from contact centre systems; traditionally voice calls from an ACD, but increasingly other channels of media such as and web chat. Advanced WFM solutions collect historic data and allow for special variations such as planned growth, promotions and seasonality, to accurately forecast demand. The WFM solution compares its forecast with actual results on the day. This allows the contact centre to optimise shifts during the day to proactively deliver the best possible results. Workforce management solutions will deliver benefits in the following key areas: Shift pattern generation - Matches forecast to scheduled demand and generates optimum shift patterns to provide an effective level of staffing Intra-day optimisation - Supports the resource planner to respond to on-the-day events and effectively manage shift changes Managing overtime and time off in lieu (TOIL) - Balanced provision reduces the need for crisis overtime requests, preventing unnecessary overstaffing with the related problems of bored staff. The planning tools allow close control over each day which enables appropriate planning for activities such as meetings or training as well as TOIL Agent self-service - Providing agent desktop tools reduces the administrative burden on the supervisor or resource planner 8

9 SELF-SERVICE VIA AGENT DESKTOP (time saved per agent in minutes per week) Time spent publishing schedules Time spent processing shift swaps Time spent processing leave requests Time spent publishing leave balance Total time saved per agent per week 2 min 2 min 2 min 4 min 10 min Reduced absenteeism A morale benefit accrues from the agent s perception that there is fair and transparent treatment for all colleagues with their ability to manage shift change requests Administration time - The provision of information to other systems such as payroll and human resources benefits supervisory staff by reducing the administration time for necessary statistics Resultant estimated savings for administration - In the Self-service via Agent Desktop table above, we explore the areas for saving, and quantify small savings. Agents need schedules; they ask for shift swaps and need leave requests processed. Self-service by agents via an agent desktop tool empowers them, improves morale and removes nuisance task load for the resource planner. As detailed in the table, a conservative estimate would reduce the administrative load for a resource planner or supervisor by 10 minutes per agent per week Promoting agent adherence Promoting a Powerof-One philosophy helps agents to understand the impact that their actions will have on colleagues when they make even small deviations from their schedule. This approach increases agent motivation to AGENT ADHERENCE Possible minutes of lost time in any one day Minutes late at start of shift Minutes early going to break Minutes late back from break 1 min 1 min 1 min Number of breaks 3 Minutes logging off early Total daily lost minutes (1+3+3) None 7 min work within their schedule and promotes team work and morale. Returning late by even one minute from each break is three lost minutes per day. As illustrated in the Agent Adherence Table above it is relatively easy for each agent, without any intentional misdemeanour, to lose several minutes of working time each day. In our example, a minute before or after breaks soon adds up to six minutes per day, which, when combined with even one-minute late start, would total seven minutes per day. In a 50 agent contact centre, this noncompliance would equate to the equivalent of 350 lost minutes or 5.83 hours per working day (more than the equivalent of a ½ FTE per day). 9

10 Task Spreadsheet WFM Solution Obtaining Data Forecasts Forecast Accuracy Schedule Creation Agent Interaction Employment Legislation Agent Adherence Proactive or Reactive Manual, intensive, and error-prone. Unsuitable for intra-day updates. Difficult to allow for special variations. Possible to use Erlang for voice calls but not suitable for other channels e.g. . Manual and time-consuming. Schedules not optimised. Difficult to schedule for multi-skilled agents. Hard to re-schedule at short notice. Time-consuming publication process. Hard-to-manage holiday requests and shift-swaps. Difficult to update once published. Manual process to ensure compliance with working hours and breaks, employee contracts, custom and practice. Very difficult to track agent status against schedule. No link between system status and agent schedule. Time-consuming, resource intensive, and reliant on historic data. Hard to rapidly adjust to changing circumstances. Automatically imported. Intra-day updates every interval (e.g. 30 minutes). Easily allow for special events. Calculations for all channels. Real-time display of forecast versus actual demand. Automatic and quick, even for multi-skilled agents. Schedules are optimised and a variety of staffing scenarios can be explored. Intra-day optimisation to maximise performance. Application on agent desktop to manage holiday requests, shift-swaps, and agent schedule communication. Rules-compliant schedules automatically created. Real-time changes, including intra-day optimisation, will comply with rules. Monitor adherence in real-time with automatic feed of agent status from contact centre systems. Adherence reporting for improved performance management. Automatic and in real-time to manage schedules before problems arise. Management resource freed to improve other aspects of performance. 10

11 Exploring the soft efficiency mechanisms Many organisations can also increase revenue by using WFM to help deliver the best possible customer experience at the lowest cost. Customer experience and retention is improved when better forecasting improves service levels and reduces abandonment. Projects that are solely focused on efficiency often miss these added benefits which can accelerate savings by making real productivity and profitability gains and include: Right person, right place, right time - The right agent equipped with the right skills at the right time, reduces abandonment and enhances customer experience, thus improving customer satisfaction (CSat) scores. Satisfied customers remain loyal with repeat purchases. They are more likely to make recommendations, adding to an organisation s success. Promote first contact resolution - Using the optimising function to ensure that correctly skilled agents are available to answer queries, promotes first contact resolution. Additionally, increasing the productivity of each interaction improves staff morale and reduces absenteeism. Every team member understands their role. Staff retention - Improved morale from transparent shift allocation actions contributes to reduced staff churn and saves recruitment costs and time taken to train new recruits. Exploring efficiency of management reporting and control Managers and supervisors who are empowered with detailed objective data can make proactive decisions in support of business objectives and their teams. This will improve handling of the team and customer service, while still being able to remain focused on the organisation s goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Managers are supported with: Improved visibility of key performance indicators Improved planning and budgeting for recruitment and hiring More accurate planning and budgeting, reducing need to overstaff An ability to run what if planning scenarios to find optimal alternatives to meet volume demands Improved intra-day management of queue volumes, staffing levels and exception management Considering the alternative, why not just use spreadsheets? Many contact centres, especially those with relatively fixed agent shift patterns, attempt to manually forecast and schedule using spreadsheets. While the use of spreadsheets will provide structure and support smaller centres, there are numerous factors that mean a dedicated WFM solution will provide a return on investment: The challenges with spreadsheets: Errors are implicit - Numerous academic studies have highlighted the high number of errors contained in operational spreadsheets. Research at Dartmouth College 6 found the weighted average of spreadsheets containing errors from seven surveys at 94%. 11

12 Inability to react at short notice - The manual and time-consuming nature of using spreadsheets makes it difficult to react at short notice to unexpected fluctuations in demand, and to optimise new agent requirements and revised service levels. Managing crisis by gut feel - In a crisis, manually reworking an intra-day update is not practical, and any changes made while supervisors are under pressure often impact on forecasting accuracy. As a result, in a time of peak demand, supervisors know that what they really need to do is support agents; pragmatically they will then make gut-based decisions to manage the day instead of using objective, data-based alternatives. Using a WFM solution would provide more objective support when it is needed most. Exploring the combined return on investment from all efficiency mechanisms The hard benefits of WFM deliver operational savings and a rapid payback that allows for improved customer service without additional resource. Soft benefits are often under-estimated. Customer satisfaction has a significant impact on organisational success. Satisfied customers cost less and spend considerably more, and these positive financial results should encourage sceptics to re-evaluate the revenue benefits of WFM. Research 7 underpins the notion that satisfied customers return and on average spend two and a half times more than first-time buyers. It is universally agreed that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain a current one; in fact proponents argue that, dependent on market served, customer acquisition costs between four to ten times more 8. Improvements in customer retention can be directly linked to the return on investment of a workforce management solution that delivers improved first contact resolution and the related improvement in customer satisfaction. Providing increased management visibility and control enables managers to deliver more accurate planning and budgeting, and facilitates more proactive scenario planning. It is important to keep focused on the goal of improved profitability with increased customer satisfaction. Delivering on the business case Typically creating a solid business case that can be confidently delivered is challenging. Throughout this section we have clearly demonstrated that a wide range of hard, soft and managerial benefits are delivered. The improvement in service levels that are attained positively impact customer satisfaction and contribute to improved sales performance. The improved productivity will deliver solid financial results and contribute to creating a more successful organisation for all stakeholders. 12

13 MAXIMISE THE USE OF YOUR WFM INVESTMENT Benchmark your progress, make small gains regularly Proactively manage and check your levers of operation Remember your agents are your key resource Use reserve working to readily respond to changing circumstances In the previous section we explored the aspects that would contribute to delivering a positive result from the implementation. However, in the day-to-day operation of any new solution, it is easy to focus on the items that the team can quickly assimilate and implement while the remaining powerhouse of functionality is neglected. These best practice tips are designed to help you make the most of the full range of WFM functionality, and to achieve the available potential as you manage your workforce today, tomorrow and in the future. Ensure you use all of the system Your WFM tool should effectively support managers with both daily management and business planning. As a Daily Management Tool - You will be enabled to optimise your available staffing resources by taking into account forecasted demand, pre-booked holiday and staff time-off. In addition to planned activities that affect service levels, your WFM tool should be responsive to on-the-day changes, for example, when staff members are sick or if there is a surge in demand; it should also recommend ways to optimise the available resources such as changing break times. As a Business Planning Tool - What-if planning enables the user to forecast the level of resource needed to achieve required service levels and calculate the cost of any course of action. Managers often need to understand the impact of meeting current and long-range scenarios. Tactical support for scheduled sales events, Bank Holidays or seasonal changes such as a weather warnings, allow the management team to make objective, financially-sound decisions. Benchmark your progress In order to accurately assess the impact on the workforce and budgets, it is important to benchmark at regular intervals. Benchmarking enables you to see where you are at any given point in time, and showcases your progress, savings and service level achievements. This will provide your organisation with an opportunity to understand the impact of any trends and your team s potential future performance. 13

14 Reduced administration, more management Harness the available reporting and tracking capabilities to reduce administration time and resource, and gain proactive management time. Review your current reporting and administration processes to see how they can be streamlined or replaced by your WFM tool functionality. Use the export function to provide details to other departments. Provide management reports for daily, weekly, monthly or annual performance, providing an accurate summary of all activities and enabling opportunities for trends to be identified. Be sure to investigate the following types of reports and the benefits they could bring: Work Plan Summary Report should provide you with a summarised, editable view of any activity or type of agent absence, the hours used to resource the contact centre, the cost per contact, any over / under staffing and projected costs, accuracy of contact forecasting, agent utilisation or occupancy and performance. Agent Summary Report should trace activity and absence for single agents, groups of agents or the whole centre. This facilitates the compilation of performance reports that can be used in monthly meetings or appraisals. In addition, you will be able to identify key performers who could be rewarded and / or highlight individuals or teams who may require additional attention. Agent Time Tracking Report should allow you to automatically track holiday and sickness, as well as agent hours owed, if operating a TOIL system. This can also provide accurate reports to monitor performance and working patterns to align with Human Resources (HR) or Payroll. Proactively manage each day Use your WFM tool to proactively manage on-the-day changes, providing you with the flexibility to adapt to unexpected changes. Adding new information, such as staff sickness, early in the day puts you in a position to adjust to the updated forecast either by using shift optimiser to pull in an additional agent, or by allowing overtime or moving breaks or agents between teams. When changes are not included until the end of the day, you limit your capacity to gain the most from your investment. Suggestion: Our Professional Services Consultants report that the single, most effective and cost-free way to limit the damage of unexpected events to SLA achievement, is to manage agent breaks. This technique can make the difference between success and failure in your contact centre and should be part of your daily routine. Check your levers of operation If the results you are actually achieving differ significantly from the WFM tool reports, check your levers of operation. Remember, your business evolves and changes, understanding exactly what is happening will ensure you can plan accurately and proactively: Average handling time (AHT) - Is the most commonly overlooked area this can make a significant difference to the accuracy of your results. For example, if AHT is set at an average of 300 seconds and the reality is an average of 500 seconds, the forecast will predict that fewer agents than actually necessary would be required to respond to customer demand, leading to service failure. 14

15 Indirectly occupied time (IOT) - Management is vital to ensure that agents are available when planned and required. Call volumes - Run continual checks to see that these are the same as anticipated; any unexplained service level agreement (SLA) deviations may be due to untracked deviations. Check that the volumes reported by your management information system (MIS) are the same as those in the WFM solution. Adherence - Check to see that agents are adhering to their schedules. Remember your agents are your key resource Contact centres are, by their very nature, labour intensive. The morale of your agents is vital to the success of the centre. If you have an agent who agrees to do two hours overtime at short notice, show them the impact of what they are doing using the Intra-day monitor. Understanding the direct effect of their contribution is motivating for agents, and reinforces the concept of the Power-of-One. Reserve working Industry experience shows us that no forecast is ever 100% accurate, but pragmatically, results show you should expect a 10% variation in both call forecasts and agent availability. This variability suggests that a Resource Planner should have a 20% contingency. A planner with this flexibility enables the centre to respond more readily to changing circumstances, and reduces the chance of service failure and the reliance on costly overtime. The practice of reserve working is a method where a proportion of agents, on a weekly basis, have their shifts designed for the coming week to meet emerging business needs. Ideally, around 20% of agents should be on reserve in any one week. Agents take their turn, on a rostered basis, at being on reserve. Reserve shifts top up the deviation provision and take into account changing call patterns/absences for the specific week. Reserve working leads to two additional agent benefits: When schedules are inaccurate, the agents in the centre have to work harder to make up any shortfall. The benefit of using reserve teams is a more even distribution of work for everyone, reducing the impact of extraordinary workloads. The reserve team know in advance that during their assigned reserve shifts they will need to flexibly adapt their hours to meet demand. A rota that includes reserve working will have a much longer life (and be more agent friendly) as it can respond flexibly and easily to meet business needs. This limits the upheaval of frequent, and often unpopular, rota redesign. Investigate the Reserve Scheduler in your WFM tool and harness it to bring significant business and staff benefits. Ensuring that you maximise the use of your workforce management asset will provide benefits in managing your workforce now and in the future. 15

16 HOW NETCALL SUPPORTS YOU TO MAXIMISE YOUR PERFORMANCE Organisations are constantly evolving as they adapt to meet business demands. Netcall has delivered workforce management and customer engagement since the mid-1990 s and is continually growing its capability to support full workforce optimisation solutions. We will support you every step of the way through your WFM deployment and much more. This offers significant benefits: The ability to move ahead with strategically important business initiatives The freedom to deploy solutions as the contact centre develops over time You can plan and control how quality and performance are holistically integrated within the management of your workforce A comfortable focus on projects that optimise agent productivity and improve customer experience Our highly-trained team of Professional Services Consultants have a deep knowledge of contact centres, gained from hands-on experience. Into the future Gartner believes that WFO solutions should be embraced strategically within the contact centre due to the associated benefits which include improved operational performance. It may take several years to adopt a unified solution because of existing investments. Netcall offers solutions across the WFO journey. We support modular deployment to meet organisational business requirements, while delivering a positive return on investment. This means that as contact centre performance needs are uncovered, the corresponding Netcall solution can be added to the growing suite, enhancing productivity and return on investment while transforming the customer experience. If you need to take a balanced approach to your workforce optimisation investment, speak to our team of Professional Services Consultants and discover how we can support your organisation on its journey. Netcall Professional Service Consultants all have call centre experience and the ability to offer advice. They instinctively speak our language and have involved us in the development of the software. Contact Centre Manager From superb account management to excellent technical support, the level of service we receive from Netcall is second to none. We believe that our WFM investment helps us maintain our well-earned reputation for delivering an exceptional customer experience. Resource and Planning Manager Since our Netcall solution was implemented I have found that my days are more structured and organised. This is very helpful as I can see the forecast for the coming week and, where necessary, plan ahead. Customer Services Advisor 16

17 References: 1. ContactBabel UK contact centres in 2014 The State of the Industry 2. Gartner, 2013 Critical Capabilities for Contact Center Infrastructure 3. Call Centre Helper 4. MarketScope for Contact Center Workforce Management, th July 2007 G Analyst(s): Jim Davies 5. ContactBabel The UK Contact Centre HR & Operational Benchmarking Report (3rd edition /14) 6. A critical review of the literature on spreadsheet error ( 7. (The 10 Habits of Highly Effective Customer Service Organizations 26 August 2014) showcases Zappos where as much as 75% of their sales comes from return customers, who on average spend 2.5 times more than first timers 8. Camfoundation ( ). Netcall is one of the UK s leading providers of end-to-end Customer Engagement Solutions. Our software product suite provides compelling solutions that are transforming customer engagement, including Multichannel Contact Centre, Workforce Optimisation, Proactive Outbound Applications, Customer Self Service, IVR & Speech Recognition, PCI IVR Payments, Case & Document Management and Customer Service Business Process Management. Our solutions are available on-premise, cloud or a hybrid blend of both. Netcall s customer base contains over 700 organisations in both the private and public sectors, including over 70% of the NHS Acute Health Trusts, major telecoms operators and leading commercial organisations across many sectors. Our aim is to enable clients deliver superior customer service. CONTACT Hamilton House, 111 Marlowes, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP1 1BB t f e enquiries@netcall.com w in g+ NCE3-WFM