Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
SF Gov Agency Goes Beyond Spreadsheets to Manage Complex Scheduling Environment
The Human Services Agency (HSA) of San Francisco runs an important series of community programs, among them Medi-Cal, which offers free or low-cost health coverage to more than 170,000 people, CalFresh, which helps to improve the health and well-being of qualified households, and CalWORKS, which provides financial aid and services to 3,900 families.
Not surprisingly, the agency’s call center can be a busy place; 585 agents handle the various questions and phone support needed to run these Bay area programs.
For HSA, one big challenge was scheduling. The spreadsheets used by HSA for scheduling were simply not sufficient to handle the dynamic needs of a large call center staff servicing several programs.
“In this type of environment, there are so many different things that might be happening in a given day,” stressed Taninha Ferreira in a recent case study, SF Benefits Net Operations Manager. Manual scheduling was a nightmare before the agency turned to a dedicated workforce optimization solution.
“It caused a lot of problems,” Ferreira recalls. “We had to do a lot of last-minute running around and were constantly making changes on the fly.”
But what a difference a good dedicated workforce management solution can provide, in this case Monet WFM Live.
After adopting Monet WFM Live, Ferreira says HSA experienced “total improvement.” Instead of a chaotic scheduling process, now agency schedules are built out for months and employees and supervisors can always know when they have meetings, when they should be in training, and what they should be doing each day. Schedule adjustments such as vacation and sick days automatically shift schedules to close coverage gaps.
Monet WFM Live is a cloud-based management solution that delivers workforce management, call recording, quality assurance and performance management. Its customizability was particularly attractive for HSA.
“Our systems are very complex and require a lot more customization, so I was looking for a solution where that would not be an issue,” notes Ferreira. “I think we use the Monet Extensions tool more than any other customer - we really rely on customizing schedules.”
Both the transparency from a workforce management system and the efficiency are big wins for the agency, adds Ferreira.
“The value of Monet WFM for us is the transparency it provides – everyone knows what everyone is doing,” says Ferreira.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi