Four months ago, GMT Corporation, an industry leader in enterprise workforce management and performance optimization solutions, began working with South Carolina Federal Credit Union. The Credit Union has already increased its answering services by more than 90 percent, which significantly improved the level of customer satisfaction and overall call center operations within the call center.

According to a press release, GMT’s Chief Executive Officer Simon Angove hopes South Carolina Federal’s success will be the hype needed for other credit unions to look at automated workforce optimization solutions as a way to improve workforce performance in order to better meet member demands.

In early 2010, South Carolina Federal was ranked as the largest credit union in the State of South Carolina with over 143,000 members and over $1.3 billion in assets. To improve call center operations and member service satisfaction, the credit union quickly came to the conclusion that it needed to make some technology investments right away. In particular, members that called into the institution’s call center found themselves waiting for extended durations of times to speak with a call center agent. This led to many upset members who refused to wait and instead decided to hang up.

The credit union decided on GMT’s GMT Planet workforce optimization solution to improve call center management during peak times and further improve agent productivity. Due to GMT Planet, the organization was able to improve visibility to workload and workforce needs and enhance work-life balance for employees, the release stated.

“We have seen dramatic improvements in our call center operations in particular,” said Jessica Williams, contact center manager for South Carolina Federal. “We saw our average speed to answer drop to a more reasonable 20 seconds and our average abandonment rate is now less than 2 percent. We discovered that we were significantly understaffed during high volume times of the day. Our implementation of GMT Planet not only helped us identify those key times when we needed more – or fewer – agents, but also provided us the tools by which we could measure performance and hold our contact center and branch management accountable.”