Case Study: Athens Services

CUSTOMER PROFILE

THE CHALLENGE

Athens Services continues to evolve from a hauler of trash and recyclables to a full-fledged partner with residential and commercial clients on disposal and environmental issues. The company’s rapid growth drives — and relies upon — expanded capacity in its contact center, as well.

Last year, Athens Services was awarded the contract for the city of Los Angeles, the largest contract of its kind ever awarded to a company in the disposal industry, which has come with big responsibilities. With several NICE CXone products already in place, the company’s contact center is well positioned to handle its growing demands.

But this wasn’t always the case. Only a few short years ago, virtually everything in the contact center was being done manually. That began to change, with the implementation NICE CXone’s CXone ACD/IVR.

“We were a company that was growing, and we didn’t even have an IVR until NICE CXone,” says Dora Castro, City Liaison/Admin. “We used Outlook for emails. Our family is huge on service, so as we were researching companies, we knew we needed a partner, technology, that would take us to that next level. And that certainly is what NICE CXone has done for us.”

Although automating calls and routing made a big difference, there were still complex, time-consuming issues behind the scenes that hindered productivity and efficiency: determining peak call periods, scheduling and adapting workflow, monitoring quality, coaching agents — and most of all, trying to pull it all together into a cohesive, actionable picture of call center operations.

Dora describes the chaos and frustration of those days. “When you’re constantly growing, call volume fluctuates wildly, and it’s hard to predict the peaks. And that’s affected by all kinds of variables, including the weather,” she says. “We were reactive to our call volume, altering schedules and having meetings on the fly, going back and forth throughout the day to add skills to agents, depending on volume. We’d use various spreadsheets to forecast, schedule and calculate staffing needs. And we didn’t really have an effective or efficient way of engaging our employees other than with reports that were time consuming to generate.”

And then a solution arrived, Dora says: “NICE CXone Workforce Management was our savior.”

THE SOLUTION

“You can’t imagine the nightmare we had before…,” she says. “But everything changed with CXone Workforce Management. It has allowed us to schedule and track everything at a high level. This is the tool we need to go to another level, to service our customers. We want to improve the customer experience, and this is how we’re doing it, through CXone Workforce Management… We’re learning to trust the tool, and it is working. How did we go for so long without using this tool?”

Dora says that CXone Workforce Management has resulted in steady improvement that spans a number of different areas: in contact center performance overall, in agents’ productivity and efficiency and in the substantial time savings she and a colleague have realized in managing workforce management functions. Although weather, holidays and other variables can be factors, she says a recent day’s stats are indicative of positive, upward trends.

“That day, our service level was 90%; average hold time was nine seconds; average talk time including disposition was slightly over four minutes; and our abandon rate was .5%. It was a good day…!”

CXone Workforce Management drives agent adherence, big-picture improvement

Dora says that CXone Workforce Management has been instrumental in identifying and addressing issues in another critical area: agent adherence.

“That was an eye-opener to the bigger picture of what was going on in our call center,” she says. “It helped us pinpoint where our weak spots were, and it was our agents not adhering to breaks or lunch schedules or maybe idling off a little too long. No one realized it before. When we first implemented CXone Workforce Management, we were at 67% adherence; now we’re at about 82% — a huge improvement!”

CXone Performance Management provides real-time visibility

The company also utilizes NICE CXone Performance Management, which had been implemented even before CXone Workforce Management and provided the initial visibility into contact center operations.

“…With CXone Performance Management, we can see in real time — service levels, calls holding, what our agents are doing — and then we can generate reports,” Dora explains. “That gives us a snapshot of call volume for specific skills and also our service level at a particular time of the day, so we can gauge where we are and what to anticipate, and if we need to make changes in the department, we can.”

Athens Services places a lot of importance on transparency, as well as providing agents the right tools and rewarding them for excellence. CXone Performance Management has given agents visibility into their individual and team performance stats, which fosters engagement and healthy competition.

“CXone Performance Management has helped motivate our agents to be more productive and challenges them to always do better,” Dora says. “When the agents see that we’re very transparent with the team and they’re able to see their efficiency scores, it’s a big morale booster — encouragement for the team to step up their game. Agents are recognized and rewarded on excellence in performance and attitude, or ‘the Athens Way’.”

“I would recommend NICE CXone to anyone because of everything it does.”

For the future, Dora says Athens Solutions may add additional CXone products: SMS, as an additional customer channel, and CXone Analytics, as an important tool for managers and supervisors.