Workforce optimization/scheduling:
Evolving scheduling models improve workforce management

What’s the most valuable asset in your call centre? Of course, it’s your front-line agents. Teleperformance reveals how its workforce management model is evolving uniquely at each of its sites in Canada and even within sites for individual clients.

By Christopher Watchorn

Our workforce management team supports five different scheduling models. We started from seniority based scheduling and have evolved each model over time responding to the client needs and their customer requirements balanced with our employees’ preferences.

With our team-based scheduling model, agents are scheduled to work the same days and all start within a two hour window of each other. This builds strong teams and acts as a great competitive tool internally within the site. It also means that reps will be with their supervisors and peers everyday for more than 80 per cent of each shift.

Our block-scheduling model provides full-time agents with three-hour windows within which their shifts will start. We take it one-step further by working with recruitment to communicate the block as employees join our team and then schedule the new hire training based on the block. This model has been very successful with recruitment. Employees always know their approximate work schedule (within three hours) which lets them plan their time outside the call centre.

In our performance-based scheduling model, we combine tenure and recent performance to determine rankings for shift bids. This model works well on some of our larger queues; it acts as an incentive for our newest agents to strive for excellence and once one of the new hires gets an earlier start time the challenge is on for the rest of the class to follow suit.

Our flex model rewards employees who are willing to be flexible and respond to quick (from a few hours to a couple of days) changes in their schedule. These employees volunteer for this arrangement and must be meeting performance standards to be selected. They are paid a shift premium and are required to be flexible at least 80 per cent of the time each month. This group typically represents five to 15 per cent of the staff for any campaign and provides us with pre-arranged flexibility to respond to volume pattern changes in advance of the next schedule or whatever hurdle needs to be overcome right now.

We continue to have seniority based scheduling for a few of our smaller campaigns.

Adding further complexity to the scheduling process is working with different models for the same campaign when calls are handled at multiple sites. This isn’t easy but it’s the right thing to do.

In partnership with our Organizational Effectiveness team, monthly focus groups are held at each site for those employees celebrating a birthday that month. Ongoing feedback is solicited from the reps; their feedback is recorded anonymously and it forms the foundation of our scheduling evolution. We strive to build upon feedback to make our processes better to deliver on our commitment to our employees.

We have worked with our clients to ensure they deliver accurate forecasts and/or review and sign-off on all our assumptions every week. We believe that to mitigate employee impacts it’s critical that each client is involved in your processes. We are a third-party call centre organization and we must continually offer our clients and their customers’ high service standards. This can be planned out in advance with effective workforce management tool usage.

At Teleperformance, we use Blue Pumpkin and continually take advantage of on-site hands-on training directly from the manufacturer. With complex models and historical patterns, the traditional hand-me-down model of training for the workforce management team is not sufficient. Our new analysts joining the workforce management team begin with one campaign and as their competencies improve we cross- train on all our other campaigns. This process takes upwards of six months as consistent proficiency must be demonstrated before moving on to the next campaign.

Supporting multiple models can only be successful through a maniacal focus on all facets of the overall operation. By combining strong analytics with ongoing feedback from our clients and front-line reps, our scheduling models will continue to evolve.

TIPS:
Speak with your front-line reps. Are they happy with their schedules? What feedback or suggestions do they have? Look at your scheduling model. How can you make it more responsive to the changes in your call centres? And most importantly talk to your customers. What more could you be doing? How would they change things? What are their other vendors doing? Remember it’s a partnership.

Christopher Watchorn is vice-president of Business Intelligence at Teleperformance in Canada; www.teleperformance.com/canada