Call Recording Featured Article

Oi Telecom Group, the largest telecommunications company in Brazil, has used NICE workforce management and recording software since 2005. It has long used those products to increase the occupancy of its call centers and allow its agents to perform more efficiently. The recent adoption of NICE consulting services has heightened Oi’s aspirations and, NICE now reports, has allowed the telecom to achieve its goals.

In its latest public news release, NICE references a series of best practices workshops it conducted this January at a Brazil Telecom Call Center (BRTCC) location. BRTCC outsources its services to Oi and makes use of workforce management and consulting services. It reported a decrease in 23 percent of agent management staff and a two percent reduction in full time equivalent staff members. It then reassigned those individuals to other parts of the call center to harness their skills in ways that could best assist customers.

Radakian Lino, the customer relationship intelligence manager at Oi, commented that this type of restructuring lies exactly within the purview of NICE product capabilities.

“Large scale operations in the telecom customer services industry such as ours are typically impacted by economies of scale and complexities that only NICE can leverage with features such as skill routing simulation, multi-skill efficiencies, agent self-service including schedule trades and changes, and flexible and smart work rules definitions,” Lino said.

The scale of the BRTCC call center operation for Oi extends to 20,000 employees, five sites, and 54 million calls taken in Brazil. By any measure, a group of employees that large should be called “enormous.” It makes sense that a sophisticated management system would be necessary to schedule agents and make sure each calling day runs smoothly.

NICE takes into consideration the entire skill set of each agent. It can then take a look at the workload expected for a day (forecasting) and schedule staff work times and breaks according to customer demand that will rise and fall in any given period of several hours. The workforce management software even handles the scheduling of days off and individual agent requests for scheduling changes. It knows how to maneuver agents based on their skill sets so customers can receive high-quality experiences no matter when they reach a call center.

It is clear that Oi and BRTCC have made significant changes to their operations by making full use of the NICE systems. Officials’ next tasks, it appears, will be to use the knowledge they gained during the recent workshops to further optimize their scheduling techniques and better manage their agent populations.