Top Global Financial
Services Company

The Challenge

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

The WFM team at the top global financial services, credit card and payment company has been a leader in modeling and investigating all promising opportunities in their contact centers and evaluating new generation technologies as well. The team focuses on revenue increasing opportunities at their sales centers involved in up-selling and service levels at their customer service centers. Having recognized the shortcomings of the traditional WFM software, they have carried out numerous modeling and analysis initiatives using their own tools. To evaluate how ac2’s new generation WFM technologies may help their operations, the WFM team decided to carry out a data driven study to generate and compare schedules using their traditional WFM solution and the AWO Optimal Scheduler.

Opportunities Identified

The AWO Optimal Scheduler uses ac2’s patent-pending concurrent schedule optimization technology to minimize total cost or scheduled agent time and determine the highest schedule efficiency possible in a contact center environment. With AWO’s concurrent schedule optimization technology, work and off days, daily start times, break times are all optimized according to the tour group and shift template parameters concurrently to meet service level targets or maximize profits. ac2 Solutions also provides technology to generate revenue- optimal staffing levels and schedules for up-selling/cross-selling centers.

In order to determine how “optimal” the schedules generated by their WFM software, the WFM team developed a plan to benchmark its agent scheduling capabilities with the AWO Optimal Scheduler over a target week. They used the following contact center environment within their Company:

• 1 contact center environment
• 4 contact center locations with 2 vendor locations
• 570 full time agents
• 2 skill types
• Only 5×8 (no less than 60%) and 4×10 (no more than 40%) schedules
• 38 part time agents on fixed schedules provided by the Company
• Consistent start times and break times

Using the same contact center data for the target week, agent schedules were generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler and provided to the WFM team. The team verified the adherence of the AWO schedules to weekly tour, daily shift and break scheduling parameters, agent and skills availability, agent, and operating hours, etc.

The AWO Optimal Scheduler showed significant advantages and improvement opportunities in all metrics used over the WFM software and the proprietary tools used by the Company. Major benefits realized included:

• 5.5% savings in schedule costs: Schedules generated by The AWO optimal scheduler cost at least 5.5% less than those developed by the Company’s traditional WFM system and tools.
• 99% schedule efficiency: The AWO Optimal Scheduler provided 99% schedule efficiency.
• 2% lower abandonment rates in the sales area: Schedules generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler reduced the abandonment rates by 2% by answering 86,000 more sales calls than the schedules generated by the Company’s WFM software and tools.
• 81% reduction in excess agent time: The AWO Optimal Scheduler scheduled 81% less excess agent hours than the Company’s WFM software.
• Even distribution of % AOD time into intervals: Schedules generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler distributed agent-on-duty time into each interval by even percentage of requirements, another requirement of the WFM team to avoid substantially higher shortages over weekends.