In 2023, contact center leaders at the Finnish Tax Administration considered their back-office operations a virtual blackhole of information.

During any given day, they never knew exactly what was happening. They never knew on which cases employees were working. No automated technology facilitated the forecasting/scheduling and work distribution for the 3,500 back-office contact center employees employed across 525 different roles. And, while dedicated workers did their best to manually process all incoming cases using spreadsheets and sheer force, the approach wasn’t fast or efficient—and it did nothing to boost their employee satisfaction or morale.

Leaders needed a way to improve the efficiency of the tax administration’s back-office operations while giving the employees who worked there the flexible schedules and improved work/life balance they deserved.

After witnessing firsthand how much more efficient and effective Calabrio Workforce Management (WFM) could make frontline forecasting and scheduling tasks, contact center leaders at the Finnish Tax Admin decided to make Calabrio WFM the new technology backbone of their back-office resource planning activities.

Now, Calabrio WFM powers all back-office operations for the tax administration, including all forecasting, scheduling, channel planning, and taxation tasks. Real-time work plans make back-office work less chaotic because they inform employees which work to complete and when to complete it, they put each worker’s unique work competencies to optimal use, and they take into account each worker’s specific requests and feedback.

In addition, with Calabrio WFM, managers now can schedule workers for more granular segments of time instead of just long, eight-hour shifts. And agents can use Calabrio WFM’s self-service scheduling tools.

By using Calabrio WFM to properly prioritize and more quickly respond to taxpayer inquiries, The Finnish Tax Admin is delivering a better, superior customer experience (CX) than before.

Back-office workers now are more productive and feel more empowered because their back-office backlog is 10-20% smaller than it was before, they can easily handle daily volume changes (as well as the inevitable fluctuations caused by busy tax seasons), and every one knows exactly which work takes priority at any given time.

Back-office leaders are much more confident—and much less frazzled—because they can easily, optimally allocate workers and activities, and they know that even unique back-office tasks will be done in the right way, in the right order.

And back-office managers now spend their time leading, supporting, and coaching back-office employees instead of manually planning out actual work that needs to be done.

But leaders at the Finnish Tax Admin know their CX can be even better. And that’s why they’ve set themselves an aggressive goal of cutting their average resolution time by 50% within five years—a goal they’re confident they’ll meet with the help of Calabrio WFM.