Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Texas Credit Union Reduces Contact Center Headcount and Improves KPI with Monet Software Scheduling Solution
Workforce management and scheduling are critical functions for every business, but in the contact center industry, these solutions, used properly, can be the difference between success and failure. Not only is the contact center an expensive function for a company, it has the potential to earn revenue, if properly handled. It’s also a very complex place, since the average contact center today is juggling both inbound and outbound contacts, and a variety of communications channels, all of which must be carefully balanced to ensure that the customer experience is optimal in all of them.
GECU, a non-profit Texas state chartered credit union, serves nearly 310,000 member/owners with over $2.0 billion in assets and offers a variety of traditional financial products and services including savings, accounts, consumer checking accounts, auto and mortgage loans, credit cards, business checking accounts and business loans. The company offers a wide variety of communications options and channels to member/owners, including 18 branches, ATMs throughout the city, an 85-agent call center (which is comprised of a loan center, account information, Internet banking, tech support and more), an online banking platform, and www.mygecu.org, GECU's new mobile banking solution.
GECU determined that it needed a way to deliver better member service with fewer resources while also getting better insights into their contact center operations, and it understood that the way to do this was through improved scheduling. Specifically, the goals were to increase individual and departmental productivity, achieve service level attainment, decrease agent available time or “idle time,” improve the accuracy of staffing projections (daily and yearly) and implement a reporting option that integrates with their current CMS system.
Ultimately, the company chose Monet Software’s cloud-based solution, resting the decision on the product’s affordability, post-implementation training, tech-support resources, and reporting tools. The company found the cloud-based model appealed since it meant it would have to maintain fewer in-house IT resources. The solution, which had a quick implementation time, has made a big difference in GECU’s operations, according to the company’s assistant vice president for the call center, Joshua Gomez.
“Now that we have brought Monet in, we are able to push the envelope with handling time and scheduling. Not only has it saved us costs from an administrative perspective, it also greatly helped us with agent head count. We were able to reduce our number of agents by 14 thanks to more effective scheduling and forecasting."
The results have been so promising, the company hopes to use the solution across other organizational functions.
"We have other departments that want to take advantage of this tool as well because of their observations of how we were able to better manage our resources and call volume staffing requirements while reducing staff. Lastly, we found that we were scheduling too many people on Saturdays so Monet has really been instrumental in helping to reduce overtime. Our quality and service levels are averaging in the top 97 percent tier, third party vendors who evaluate us also rank us in the top 2 percent.”
Edited by Stefania Viscusi