In an effort to consistently and cost-effectively deliver a superior customer experience across the enterprise, businesses are finding that it is challenging to also control labor costs. A solution to this conundrum that has been utilized by numerous business entities is the workforce management solution from GMT called GMT Planet. Tailored to the specific challenges of back offices, contact centers and branch offices, the solution is designed to reduce operating costs without diminishing the customer experience.

South Carolina’s largest non-profit credit union, South Carolina Federal Credit Union, found itself in need of such a technology solution for both its branch and contact center operations that would not only help it maintain a great credit union member experience, but also provide a better work-life balance for its workforce. To achieve this goal, it evaluated solutions from a number of vendors and ultimately selected GMT’s GMT Planet®.

South Carolina Federal Credit Union reported that it implemented the solution in its contact center in February 2010 and in its branch network in May 2010. Once the rollout was complete in November, the credit union saw results immediately.

“We have seen dramatic improvements in our contact center operations in particular,” said Jessica Williams, contact center manager for South Carolina Federal. “We saw our average speed to answer plummet to a more reasonable 20 seconds and our average abandonment rate is now less than two percent. We discovered 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.”

GMT Planet does this with a graphical interface known as “workload fit.” It is a constantly updated measure of how closely workforce availability matches caller demand so managers can tell if they are overstaffed, and therefore providing great, albeit very costly, service, or if they’re understaffed which can result in long queues and on-hold times producing less-than-happy credit union members.

Now the credit union uses a specially-trained, multi-skilled floater group of employees who are capable of working in the contact center, as tellers in the branch, or as branch service representatives. This way, when call volumes increase in the contact center, calls can be routed to these staff members in the branch who can address callers’ issues as if there were in the contact center.

GMT Planet has also taken over South Carolina Federal Credit Union’s paper method of scheduling employee time off requests so employees now have the advantage of more flexible work schedules. In addition, GMT Planet is aiding the credit union with its coaching. Coaching sessions are now included in each agent’s schedule at designated times, thus the agent and the coach can focus on the coaching session instead of fretting about call volume spikes.

Since the GMT Planet has helped South Carolina Federal so greatly improve customer service, improve its team members’ work-life balance and decrease costs in both its branch operations and contact center, Jessica Williams said, “We expect to roll out GMT to other departments including front-line employees and support staff in the near future.”

In other news, TMCnet reported that Bomgar (News - Alert), a provider of secure, appliance-based remote support solutions, has unveiled Bomgar Analytics, which has been developed as a brand new dashboard and reporting solution which makes it easy for IT organizations to easily view and analyze the valuable IT support data captured by their Bomgar remote support solution.

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