The organization
The Company is a global media and technology company. From the connectivity and platforms they provide, to the content and experiences they create, they reach hundreds of millions of customers, viewers and guests worldwide. With over 180,000 employees, including approximately 55,000 contact center agents, their WFM 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 clients. They were looking for a solution to help reorganize their telecom structure. Historically, the calling queues differed based primarily on region but also 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 area code. 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 share important data about adherence or shrinkage in a more streamlined way. Additionally, the team was looking for different solutions to make scheduling easy for their agents using systems they already have in place and are familiar with, like Microsoft Teams.
Why Aspect
The Company worked with the Aspect Workforce™ 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 resides in Boston, Massachusetts, the IVR would route the customer based on the area code of the caller and not their physical location. This would cause confusion since 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 they were using. 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 enables The Company to better serve their customers. The Company team realized their previous call queues were potentially causing a less than stellar customer experience and could be a contributing factor to lowering their Net Promoter Score (NPS). The enhancements in Aspect Workforce help the workforce planning team generate significant savings over time in regard to customer retention.
Aspect Workforce became a centralized hub for all workforce data across The Company’s many divisions. In the past, the WFM team had to send separate emails to each division asking for shrinkage numbers from the previous month. Considering how many divisions there were, this took quite some time. Now, by working with Aspect Workforce team, data is easily accessible by multiple teams across divisions, helping to streamline data collection and consolidate it into meaningful, actionable business outcomes.
“Aspect Workforce has become a key huge data source for reporting. For an enterprise of our size, visibility into how much time people is spending on certain activities, how much they’re adhering to their schedule and more is incredibly valuable.” – Director of Workforce Planning
The Microsoft Teams Chatbot integration with Aspect Workforce is giving agents a whole new way to streamline how they manage their schedule. Agents get the scheduling updates they need to know about 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 a lot of enthusiasm for their leadership team, who are excited about how helpful this is for the business in terms of under or over-staffing. This has also been a great initiative to translate the real flexibility and value the partnership of the workforce planning team and Aspect Workforce to leadership.
“This Teams chatbot is part of an exciting opportunity to standardize processes across the enterprise. We’re excited about this 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 driving new, innovative initiatives to better serve their customers around the globe. They continue to find ways to deliver exceptional service for their customers, whether it’s consolidating historical queues to achieve more favorable outcomes due to continually changing business needs or providing better data access to drive more informed business decisions.
As they officially deploy the Microsoft Teams chatbot, they look forward to seeing how their agents interact and adopt this whole new way to manage their schedules with ease. The entire workforce planning team will continue to drive value across the organization with their strong, consistent relationship with the Aspect CRM, sales, and support teams.
