CUSTOMER PROFILE
Entain Group, which operates some of the world’s best sports betting, gaming, and interactive entertainment brands on five continents, migrated workforce management and employee engagement practices to NICE solutions. Because Entain operates contact centres in multiple countries, including the UK, Bulgaria, India, and the Philippines, with very different cultural standards, the communications process has been tailored to each market.
01 THE BEFORE
A global portfolio of high profile brands
Entain has grown rapidly through acquisition, accumulating dozens of high-profile gaming brands along with diverse work and management practices. The varied processes, methods, languages, and terminologies across the company's portfolio needed to be aligned for consistency and predictability across the overall customer contact operation.
Entain aimed to streamline workforce planning in each market to reduce the resources required to generate and distribute schedules. The company also wanted to improve real-time queue to facilitate better employee engagement and collaboration.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
Pushing past “business as usual”
With growth continuing at Entain, the company recognized that it would take both time and effort to bring workforce management practices together under an integrated approach. The company began looking for new digital solutions which would help create a cohesive and collegial workforce with central management, without sacrificing regional characteristics and strengths. “As a tech-based organization, our strategic direction is to look forward, into how technology can improve the experience of our colleagues,” said Tony Guthrie, Head of Operational Support & Party Operations at Entain.
Entain leadership also recognized that although the spreadsheet schedules were quite accurate, the time involved in the process took resources away from analysis and planning. There was also a need for the ability to audit the models that governed schedules. In addition, Entain wanted a more flexible and agile way to provide schedules to agents, to ensure efficiency and accuracy in each day's staffing.
Entain wanted to improve scheduling for both leaders and agents, providing the latter with more tools to empower employee engagement and enable self-service Legacy processes were targeted for elimination, and Entain took a critical look at how gamification programs would affect each of its contact centre locations. The company began its search by evaluating a selection of workforce management and scheduling solutions.
“Work to quantify the benefits is still ongoing with the help of the NICE VRS team, but I can definitely say that the move away from Excel has been a very positive one, and that with time we will be able to make a significant improvement to the day-to-day lives of our colleagues.”
HEAD OF OPERATIONAL SUPPORT & PARTY OPERATIONS
ENTAIN
03 THE SOLUTION
Employee engagement that speaks to each employee
In September 2022, Entain started a three-tiered rollout of NICE Workforce Management and Employee Engagement Manager solutions to its global associates, supported with a strategic plan from the NICE Value Realization Team. The first stage involved pilots in two markets, with the second stage covering the wider roll out of scheduling to all customer-facing agents. A final stage will add second-line and back-office teams. “The one clear, standout factor that NICE had over the closest competition was Value Realisation Services (VRS), and the continued support to realize benefits across the full lifecycle,” Guthrie said.
After discussing the diverse nature of the global workforce with VRS, NICE and Entain chose a phased rollout with messaging carefully tailored to each market. In Southeast Asia, for example, the introduction of NICE WFM and EEM were trumpeted with fanfare including office parties, prizes, and branded merchandise. “We’re very proud that in Manila, one of our largest locations, 100% of staff were trained, downloaded the app, and were engaging with it within the first week,” Guthrie said.
Elsewhere, in Eastern Europe, the rollout was more low- key to suit the tastes of the region. In all markets, training was conducted in the primary language of the contact centre, with central planning reps on-site for all go-live dates. The precise configuration of each deployment was also geared to align with cultural standards and legal requirements.
In each market, supervisors now have a greater range of control and understanding of agent activity and availability. Agents are more involved in the scheduling process and more certain that their shift details are accurate—a major consideration in markets like Manila where a typical commute can be two hours or more in one direction.
The solution is designed to add sophistication and control without forcing contributors to unlearn everything they know. Automated processes run by NICE Data Explorer and Power BI create up-to-date views of schedule status which look virtually identical to the old spreadsheets while being more accurate and easy to explore for additional detail.
04 THE RESULTS
The right choice for a global business
NICE Workforce Management and Employee Engagement Manager give Entain the flexibility needed in each contact centre, including schedules optimized against variable demand, improved insight into agent productivity, and the ability to measure each market to the same standard without forcing each contact centre into a mold that would clash with local culture or regulations.
Employee satisfaction with post-launch surveys showed strong acceptance and approval of the WFM and EEM tools, scoring 4.2 out of 5, and anecdotal praise for features like automated leave approval is high. Uptake exceeded Entain’s expectations even in the markets where a light-touch implementation was deemed the best course. “We know we are a large international business, but this project brought a realization of just how much complexity we have to deal with across a multitude of markets, cultures, and practices,” Guthrie said.
Overall time spent on forecasts is down 91% compared to the manual spreadsheet models. Metrics continue to be rolled out as markets get their footing with the new work modes, but in Entain’s largest contact centre, the planning team’s time spent creating schedules is down 88%. “Work to quantify the benefits is still ongoing with the help of the NICE VRS team, but I can definitely say that the move away from Excel has been a very positive one, and that with time we will be able to make a significant improvement to the day-to-day lives of our colleagues,” Guthrie said.
05 THE FUTURE
On course for global success
When complete, Entain’s rollout of NICE WFM and EEM will cover over 1,500 agents representing more than 70 brands and communicating with clients in 15 languages on both first- and second-line teams. As markets mature and manual scheduling processes are eliminated, Entain expects employee satisfaction with the new processes to remain high.
Future areas for improvement include a more consolidated and consistent approach to schedule publishing which gives more agents a longer look-ahead into their scheduled hours. The company expects to add new automation to time-off requests which will reduce the burden on both agents and supervisors. And feedback from each new market exposed to WFM and EEM will be added to the optimization and improvement processes.
