NICE Workforce Optimization Achieving Community Needs

The 211 LA County, a non-profit organization, began to address its technology needs with the installation of NICE IEX (News - Alert) Workforce Management. The center used the product’s capabilities initially for basic scheduling needs, but when the organization hired a workforce optimization professional, it began to fully utilize the NICE solution to meet new, stringent policies and expectations.

A recent case study pointed out some of the highlights of 211 LA’s incorporation of such a workforce optimization solution. 211 LA County is dedicated to providing a caring, professional source of information, referral and advocacy for a comprehensive range of human services to the 10 million residents of Los Angeles County. The organization’s contact center is a primarily inbound center with 75 seats, mixing part-time and full-time specialists who take calls from Los Angeles County residents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The largest 211 center in the United States, 211 LA County receives over 600,000 calls per year ranging from simple to complex requests.

The calls are only the first part of the process as the center in effect performs triage for state and local governments to understand what kinds of urgent concerns its citizens have and how best to address them. After handling calls, 211 LA County aggregates data from transactions completed by contact center specialists.                        

During Hurricane Ike and Gustave in the Gulf of Mexico, the center was able to quickly begin taking calls and routing calls to other California 211 centers. Many of that state’s own 211 centers were either evacuated or overwhelmed with calls beyond their capacity to handle.

In the first 18 months of the center’s new workforce management initiative, the NICE solution helped the center gain the equivalent of nearly 12 FTEs via productivity improvements alone. The center also uses NICE IEX Workforce Management to prepare proposals and seek grants for new initiatives.

The center saw improvements that included better specialist schedule adherence; reduced average handle time; improved exception handling and vacation planning; greater forecast accuracy, scheduling efficiency and resource planning; and improved service-level consistency.

Based on 211 LA County’s positive experiences with the workforce optimization solution, the organization chose NICE for recording and quality management, taking a step toward building its best-in-class NICE SmartCenter suite. The center records 100 percent of calls and initiates screen capture on approximately 30 percent of calls. Many of the incoming calls are of sensitive nature as callers may be looking for emergency shelter or surrendering a dependent to child welfare services, therefore, it is crucial to track these calls and record them for legal purposes.  

For specialist training and evaluation, the 211 LA County center has found that NICE Interaction Recording and NICE Quality Management has increased the quality of service provided by allowing it to listen to and formally evaluate more calls. The center has put in place a QA team that regularly listens to and calibrates the differences between the calls, a task that is cumbersome without a robust quality management solution.

Following implementation of NICE IEX Workforce Management and NICE recording and quality management, the 211 LA County center next chose to maximize its use of NICE SmartCenter by installing NICE Interaction Analytics, which has helped the center gain new capabilities and respond to changing calling conditions.

“When the H1N1 flu began showing up, we weren’t sure whether we were getting a critical mass of calls about it or not, or what they were about. We were getting calls, but we really needed to know what those calls were about so we could better train our specialists and answer caller questions,” explained Chief Operating Officer Amy Latzer.

“Because of the robust analytics, we were easily able to capture why people were calling, identify their reasons for concern or confusion, and understand what kinds of resources we needed from the county government going forward.”

The center is dynamically using Interaction Analytics to track new pilot programs much more effectively. Via NICE Interaction Analytics’ call categorization functionality, program heads can collect calls pertaining to new programs and screen those calls for information vital to measuring and improving the programs.

NICE SmartCenter has equipped 211 LA County with an integrated suite of offerings designed to work together to capture customer and business intent.