The organization
This global media and technology company reaches hundreds of millions of customers, viewers, and guests worldwide with the connectivity and platforms they provide alongside the content and experiences they create. With over 180,000 employees, including approximately 55,000 contact center agents, their workforce management needs are one of the most expansive in the world.
Motivation for change
The company’s workforce planning team has aggressive goals to ensure they’re delivering best-in-class customer service to their customers. They were looking for a solution to help reorganize their telecom structure. Historically, the calling queues differed primarily by region but also by specialty queues for callers who have a hearing impairment or need special accommodations. This queue structure made it difficult for some callers to get connected to the right agents if they were not calling from the expected region. The workforce planning team strived to consolidate these queues into one centralized queue for repair, billing, or retention. The company was hoping to find a way to centralize workforce data across different regions. This way, they could streamline sharing important data about adherence or shrinkage. Additionally, the team was looking for solutions to make scheduling easy for their agents using familiar, preexisting systems like Microsoft Teams.
Why Aspect
The company worked with the Aspect team to help consolidate the call queues. In the past, if a customer’s phone number did not align with the area in which they currently have service, such as a customer with a Denver, Colorado-based phone number who lives in Boston, Massachusetts, the interactive voice response (IVR) would route the customer based on the area code and not their physical location. This caused confusion because processes, policies, and promotions differ by division or queues within different regions.
The company was also interested in Aspect Workforce because of its ability to integrate with other key solutions. The team was specifically looking to develop a Microsoft Teams chatbot for agent scheduling, making it easy for agents to view and change their schedule.
The results
The consolidation of historical call queues enabled the company to better serve their customers. Aspect Workforce helped the workforce planning team generate significant savings over time regarding customer retention.
Aspect Workforce became a centralized hub for all workforce data across the company’s many divisions. In the past, the workforce management team had to send separate emails to each division requesting shrinkage numbers from the previous month. Considering how many divisions there were, this took quite some time. Now, with Aspect Workforce, data is easily accessible by multiple teams across divisions, helping streamline data collection and consolidate it into meaningful, actionable business outcomes.
"Aspect Workforce has become a key data source for reporting. For an enterprise of our size, visibility into how much time people spend on certain activities and how much they’re adhering to their schedule is incredibly valuable.” – Director of Workforce Planning
The Microsoft Teams chatbot integration with Aspect Workforce gives agents a new way to simplify how they manage their schedule. Agents get the scheduling updates they need with a few clicks. For example, Aspect Workforce notifies the Microsoft Teams chatbot that a given business unit is overstaffed. A contact center agent receives a notification in Teams that they’re able to take voluntary time off (VTO) for the rest of the afternoon if they’d like. The chatbot then prompts them to simply click if they’d like to take VTO. The agent’s response is then sent back to Aspect Workforce.
Additionally, contact center agents can message the Teams chatbot asking questions like “can I see my schedule for next week?” The Teams chatbot and Aspect Workforce work together to message the agent back with the requested schedule, all within the same chat. The workforce planning team created enthusiasm among leadership, who are excited about this solution solving under- or over-staffing concerns.
“This Teams chatbot is part of an exciting opportunity to standardize processes across the enterprise. We’re excited about the pathway we’ve created to make adoption for our agents simple and clean.” – Director of Workforce Planning
The future
The company is excited to continue implementing innovative initiatives to better serve their customers around the globe. Whether it’s consolidating historical queues to meet continually changing business needs or providing better data access for informed business decisions, they continue to find ways to deliver exceptional customer service.
As they officially deploy the Microsoft Teams chatbot, they look forward to seeing how agents interact and adopt this new way to easily manage their schedules. The workforce planning team will continue to drive value across the organization with a strong, consistent relationship between the Aspect, sales, and support teams. I am excited to see our customer’s reaction to not only the return of the iconic Aspect brand, but how the upcoming release of WorkforceOS will shape their employee experience. I feel honored to be apart of building a brighter future of work and I cannot wait to collaborate with our customers to make it a reality.
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