Case Study: AeC

CUSTOMER PROFILE

THE CHALLENGE

AeC invests heavily in infrastructure, technology and, mainly, in human capital, in order to ensure its clients and their customers get the best service possible. This entails an effective workforce management system, providing scheduling services and analytics for performance metrics.

The company’s existing workforce management (WFM), including scheduling, was very manual and suffered from incomplete data. Employees were frustrated by the lack of flexibility in scheduling and the lack of accuracy in tracking their adherence. The system was not user-friendly and the WFM managerial team had to invest hours creating reports. Managers and agents spent much time on correcting reporting, and it was difficult to draw out effective analysis for staffing.

These inefficiencies, inaccuracies and workarounds made it clear to the AeC team that a new WFM approach was necessary at the company’s contact centers.

THE SOLUTION

AeC found that NICE Workforce Management (WFM) met the company’s organizational needs, as the most comprehensive, efficient and cost-effective solution on the market. NICE WFM’s work rule customizability and easy configuration allowed.

AeC to fully automate a host of scheduling processes. These included shift trades among agents, ghost trades, and change requests, as well as relevant staffing adjustments impacted by shift changes.

NICE WFM eliminated the need to bring routine scheduling requests to the management team for approval. Any potential conflicts arising from schedule change requests are immediately alerted to supervisors for follow-up if needed.

The solution also allows agents access to their schedule updates when they are not in the office. This means more timely, convenient and user-friendly scheduling, up-to-date schedules, better forecasting, and the elimination of a source of employee frustration.

Minimum Disruption for Maximum Results

AeC accepted a challenging timeline for NICE WFM implementation, approximately 70 days, in order to achieve a return on investment in time to meet fiscal year objectives.

If accomplished, the company could be confident regarding projected gains suggested in the WFM project justification and business case analysis.

In addition, AeC leadership felt a short timeline would minimize the effect of the WFM transition on the business and on agent satisfaction.

“With 15,000 agent schedules on the line,” AeC Planning Coordinator Marli Mesquita said, “we knew it was an extremely aggressive timeline and any failure would impact the final result.”

The implementation project was built on three main pillars: definition, organization, and execution. The first phase, therefore, was configuration of the environments in which NICE WFM would be rolled out. This was carried out by strategic planners and analysts from six of AeC’s operational units in just five days.

After that, there were two waves of technical enablement, sharing knowledge about the NICE WFM tools with strategic planners and the tactical IT team. This ensured the new system would be incorporated correctly in the AeC business and technical support ecosystems.

The next step was integration of the NICE WFM solution with AeC’s current performance management platform. That was followed immediately by training packages for leaders, managers and supervisors regarding the use of NICE WFM metrics and features. Specifically, training was carried out in courses about schedule adherence and WebStation use for supervisors. Agent training included a knowledge base and courses online, in AeC’s e-learning system.

NICE WFM was then integrated into the AeC payroll and hierarchy management systems, to ensure accurate compensation and human resource allocation. The final integrations were with the ACDs used by AeC, Avaya and Cisco.

In collaboration with NICE, AeC carried out all the necessary integrations and training to meet the very tight timeline it had set for itself. And the company rapidly saw the results.

Amazing Improvements Impact Agent Experience

With NICE WFM providing the necessary data, automation and analysis, the most immediate impact for AeC was an increase in contact center scheduling efficiencies. This reduced labor costs in most of the company’s operations by about 12% (for example, from 516,000 to 455,000 Brazilian Real per month in one area).

While that effect was evident from the initial implementation of NICE WFM, general staffing and occupancy planning were also optimized. This was the result of NICE WFM automations relieving analysts of routine management tasks, giving them more time for value-added activities such as developing new strategies and methods for managing forecasts and schedules.

Agents, supervisors and managers adapted relatively quickly to the new NICE WFM tools and processes, which became measurable through significant improvements in agent experience metrics, such as:

• Days-off scheduling conflicts dropped by an amazing 97%.
• Schedule change requests dropped by 37%.
• Manual days-off change requests dropped by 49%.

NICE WFM replaced guesswork, manual effort, and last-minute workarounds with hard data and automation, producing accurate planning and scheduling, as well as more engaged and satisfied employees.