Delta Airlines

The Challenge

How optimal are your WFM software’s
“optimal” agent schedules?

The Reservations and Sales Organization at Delta Air Lines is a leader in pursuing all promising opportunities and technology to increase the responsiveness and operational efficiency of its customer service operations. Unsatisfied with the “Trust us – Our schedules are optimal” claims made, they carried out a data driven study to compare schedules generated by the traditional WFM systems available. Disappointing results in schedule efficiency levels and non-optimal schedules from this study led Reservations and Sales, in collaboration with Delta Technologies, to pioneer their own proprietary technologies.

Continued interest in improving schedule efficiency and service levels recently led the Delta Reservations and Sales Organization to evaluate WFM solutions and technologies available again and invite ac2 Solutions to participate. The desire, in this case, was to evaluate the opportunities offered by the available WFM software and technologies in the market and determine if any of them is providing truly optimal schedules.

Opportunities Identified

The AWO Optimal Scheduler has unique technologies that minimize the total costs and agent time for the schedules with the highest efficiency possible in a contact center environment. This is achieved using ac2’s proprietary mathematical optimization models and optimization algorithms for concurrent optimal scheduling. With AWO’s concurrent schedule optimization technology, work and off days, daily start times, and break times are concurrently optimized according to tour group and shift template parameters, and agent and skills availability to meet performance targets for the forecasted contact volumes and handling times.

In order to determine how “optimal” the schedules generated by their WFM software and the other WFM software participating in their study were, the Reservations and Sales Organization developed a plan to benchmark the agent scheduling capabilities of participating solutions over a target week using the following Delta environments:

• 2 environments
• 6 contact centers in three time zones
• 918 full time, and 151 part time agents
• 2 skill types
• Skills based routing

Using the same contact center data, weekly agent schedules for these two environments were generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler and the other WFM software participating in the study that included Delta’s proprietary scheduling technologies. Schedules generated by different WFM systems were checked by the Reservations and Sales Organization for conformance to weekly tour, daily shift, and break scheduling parameters, agent and skills availability, operating hours, etc.

The AWO Optimal Scheduler showed a remarkable advantage and improvement opportunities in all metrics over the other WFM software including the proprietary technologies used by Delta Reservations and Sales. Major benefits realized included:

• 12% savings in schedule costs: The total cost for the schedules generated by the AWO optimal scheduler were 12% lower than the schedules developed by any WFM software including Delta’s proprietary scheduling system.
• 98.5% schedule efficiency: The AWO Optimal Scheduler provided 98.5% schedule efficiency.
• 73% reduction in excess agent time: The AWO Optimal Scheduler scheduled 73% less excess agent hours.
• 100% elimination of agent shortages: Schedules generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler met all agent and skills requirements while the schedules generated by other WFM systems had significant shortages.
• Even distribution of % AOD time into each interval: Schedules generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler distributed agent-on-duty time into each interval by even percentage, another requirement of Reservations and Sales to avoid substantially higher shortages over weekends as generated by the traditional WFM software.

Using the data driven benchmarking approach, Delta Air Lines developed a road map for increased efficiency impacting both service levels and bottom line. With the AWO Optimal Scheduler, Delta Air Lines drives innovation and breakthrough performance in customer contact center operations by scheduling and deploying its most expensive and complex resource – its agents.