Top American Bank

The Challenge

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

The Customer Service and Support group at the Bank is continually interested in all promising opportunities and technologies that increase responsiveness and operational efficiency for customer service operations. Instead of accepting “Trust us – Our schedules are optimal” claims, the Customer Service and Support group wanted to understand the efficiency of agent schedules generated by their Workforce Management (WFM) Software. Here, the desire was to evaluate the efficiency of the schedules generated by their WFM system and identify opportunities offered by the concurrent optimal scheduling technology provided by the AWO Optimal Scheduler.

Opportunities Identified

The AWO Optimal Scheduler has the new generation scheduling technology to minimize total costs or scheduled agent time, and determine 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. Agent and skills requirements, work rules, and an astronomical number of possible schedules all factor into AWO’s mathematical models and algorithms.

In order to determine how “optimal” the schedules generated by their WFM software are, the Customer Services and Support group developed a plan to benchmark its agent scheduling capabilities with ac2’s Optimal Scheduler over a target week. For benchmarking their WFM software, the Bank selected one of its contact center environments involving:

• 1 contact center environment
• 4 contact centers in three time zones
• 1,168 full time, and 394 part time agents
• Six skill types
• Skills based routing

Using the same contact center data, weekly agent schedules were generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler and The Bank’s WFM software and evaluated by the Customer Services and Support group for adherence 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 WFM software used by The Bank. Major benefits realized included:

• 9.3% savings in total schedule costs: Schedules generated by the AWO optimal scheduler had substantially higher schedule efficiency and cost 9.3% less than those developed by the Bank. Total cost was reduced by minimizing excess agent time and eliminating shortages scheduled by The Bank’s WFM system.
• 99% schedule efficiency: The AWO Optimal Scheduler provided 99% schedule efficiency.
• 40 - 70 seconds reduction in ASA: Gains in average speed of answer with the AWO schedules was verified to be 45 - 70 seconds reduction.
• 100% elimination of agent shortages: Schedules generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler met all skills requirements while the schedules generated by the Bank’s WFM software had significant shortages across six skills.
• 77% reduction in excess agent time: The AWO Optimal Scheduler scheduled 77% less excess agent hours than the Bank’s WFM software.

Using the data driven benchmarking approach, the Bank developed a road map to increase efficiency, impacting both services and bottom line.