Saving money using Verint Workforce Management Solutions

The London leading minicab company Addison Lee plc has saved £1 million using Verint Workforce Management Solutions.

As London's leading premium minicab firm, Addison Lee is committed to implementing best-practice technology solutions to support its expanding business. The company carries out up to 20,000 jobs on average each day, with bookings handled by some 300 agents including 85 home agents located across the south of England. Combined, the agents typically receive over 100,000 calls each week, but this number can escalate to 40,000 calls per day, particularly during holiday periods, such as Christmas.

When Chris de Souza joined Addison Lee as call centre manager, he could see that while the company's contact centre was operating successfully, there was still a significant opportunity to optimise its performance by applying the latest workforce optimisation techniques. "Having set up and run a number of contact centres both in the UK and overseas, I wanted to make sure that Addison Lee's operations were running as effectively as possible. Key to this would be the successful implementation of a best-practice workforce management solution," he commented.

"Given the volume and flexibility of our call patterns, it had always been a major task to ensure that we had the right number of agents in place to handle Addison Lee's varying frequency of customer reservation calls. Our approach to scheduling typically involved getting as many agents as possible into the contact centre whenever we knew it was going to be busy, and then hoping that we had enough in place. While this ensured we were always able to offer a high quality of service, it also meant that as a business, we were paying a bottom-line penalty due to overlapping shifts, excess occupancy, and unplanned overtime," explained de Souza. "As a consequence of this approach, we were having to allocate a large proportion of our time to resource management. Three of our specialist managers worked on this - two of them, full time- using a complex spreadsheet to schedule all our shifts, manage staff holidays and schedules, as well as provide forecasts of activity levels," he said.

The company needed to improve its agent occupancy while making the scheduling process more efficient. This required better strategic planning and forecasting of call volumes and staffing levels. "We were confident that workforce management could make a big difference for Addison Lee's contact centre, so we carefully researched the market to identify a best-in-class solution." de Souza said.

Addison Lee selected Impact 360® Workforce Management from Verint® Witness Actionable Solutions® following a successful three-month trial. "Our assessment was that, of all the solutions available, Impact 360 delivered the most comprehensive performance functionality," de Souza explained. "We were particularly impressed by how easy our agents found it to use on a day-to-day basis." It provides a broad range of functionality, including forecasting, scheduling, strategic planning, agent self-service, scorecards, and eLearning.

"The flexibility and productivity improvements we've achieved with Impact 360 Workforce Management have ensured that we're now delivering best-practice performance and playing a key role in supporting the company's continued growth plans."Chris de Souza, Call Centre Manager, Addison Lee "With Impact 360, we've been able to unlock significant savings, not only delivering on our initial ROI goals, but also introducing new levels of efficiency into our contact centre operations. We have far greater control over our scheduling and occupancy, and we've introduced variable shift patterns while reducing unnecessary overtime costs and optimising the overall number of agents we need to deliver on our service levels."

 "At all levels, the Impact 360 implementation has made a real difference. Our agents started to use Impact 360's self-service functionality, such as time-off requests and shift swapping," de Souza said. "It's this kind of functionality that helps agents feel more in control of their working day. According to de Souza, Impact 360 Workforce Management provides additional benefits. "We pay our agents a bonus based on the number of bookings they make, and we're now handling our call volumes with proportionately fewer agents, which means our agents are enjoying a regular increase in their bonus payments."

"Since implementing Impact 360 Workforce Management, we're finding that our team leaders are able to spend much more time walking the floor and managing their staff. And because their agents are effectively able to handle their own holiday and shift swap requests, it has left them free to spend more time on coaching" commented de Souza. "We've been able to formalise our forecasting and scheduling process for our home workers and agents in the contact centre, and the same work can now be handled by a single resource manager. This not only makes our resource management more efficient, but also frees our specialist staff to spend less time scheduling and more time analysing our contact centre performance, identifying ways for further improvements,"

"The successful implementation of Impact 360 Workforce Management has resulted in a number of quantifiable bottom-line business benefits that extend far beyond the project's ROI goals. For example, Addison Lee was able to make an initial 30 percent reduction in the overall number of contact centre staff supporting its reservation business. When coupled with overtime and occupancy improvements, this has helped the company save £1 million of its annual contact centre budget. Prior to Impact 360, the company had a team of three people handling forecasting and scheduling for its agents. Now, this task is handled by one, and agent occupancy levels have risen from 40 to 70 percent. In the past, managing agent time-off requests took approximately 19 hours per week. With Impact 360, the task now takes approximately 10 minutes - a significant improvement in productivity. Addison Lee has achieved a dramatic bottom-line improvement from its expanding contact centre operations. According to de Souza, "The flexibility and productivity improvements we've achieved with Impact 360 Workforce Management have ensured that we're now delivering best-practice performance and playing a key role in supporting the company's continued growth plans. We've since grown our overall contact centre numbers following a further acquisition, and we've been able to scale our forecasting and scheduling activities to support this growth."