Appliance support tends to be highly seasonal in nature, making contact center forecasting and scheduling a challenging opportunity without a strategic, well-executed workforce management (WFM) plan modeled in advance. That’s exactly what was happening at GE Appliances — and for a variety of reasons. Existing contact center leadership, for example, lacked deep WFM expertise. Reporting in pockets was confusing, insufficient and at times inconsistent due to the many different reports built over time by many different people using many different operational definitions. And inconsistent WFM alignment between separate contact center business units prevented optimized, unified operations — each business unit director, for instance, manually completed his/her own staff modeling. Then COVID-19 hit, and GE Appliances’ contact center volumes skyrocketed by 50% above its typical monthly volume of two million — an increase that far exceeded the forecast and budget. To top it off, leaders had only two weeks to shift all 800+ contact center-based employees to working remotely, from their homes.

Despite the unforeseeable, unimaginable challenges posed by COVID-19, it only took days for contact center leaders to seamlessly transition all agents to working from home — a move that didn’t impact customers in any way. In fact, the shift was so seamless, some internal stakeholders didn’t even know it had already taken place. GE Appliances also optimized its contact center operations in the most cost-effective manner while improving the company’s overall customer experience. As a result, cost per call decreased by 15%, adherence grew by 20% (to its current rate of 90%+), the cost of hiring went down when attrition shrank by up to 25%, and the contact center workforce only had to grow 20-25% — to 1,000+ total — in order to cover the unexpected 50% call increase caused by COVID-19. Now, GE Appliances can flexibly scale its contact center up or down as needed, and expand its hiring pool since it’s immaterial where agents live. All in all, leaders can prove significant cost savings — the equivalent of 2-3 teams of full-time employees — for a 12-month time period. Long term, thanks to more-efficient agents, the contact center has the opportunity to become a profit center — rather than a cost center — for GE Appliances.