Contact center managers at Zen Internet were still using a number of Excel spreadsheets to manually plan, schedule and forecast staff—a time-consuming, complicated and inefficient process that negatively impacted its customer experience.

They needed a new workforce management (WFM) solution that would streamline their operations while supporting the company’s overall growth strategy. But that wasn’t all.

They also wanted a system that would be simple for them and their advisors to use. And, to support Zen Internet’s “happy staff” philosophy, the solution had to make it easy for agents to nimbly organize their non-work lives around their work commitments by easily checking shifts, requesting shift changes and submitting—and receiving instant responses to—requests for annual leave.

Using Calabrio WFM, contact center managers at Zen Internet now run quick and efficient forecasts, and use historical data to ensure adequate staff on any day of the year.

Preference-based scheduling lets them easily run “what-if” scenarios to understand the impact of potential volume spikes or dips. They can create schedules years in advance, then publish them to agents whenever they prefer. And, by pre-loading information about agent proficiency into Calabrio, the information—set to automatically update each week—can be used to calculate the number of agents required per shift while taking their specific skillsets and experience into account.

Managers also can build shift combinations that enable agents to work across multiple channels—such as email, chat and inbound phones—on the same day. And, when the unexpected happens—for example, an unexpected influx of calls or high absenteeism on a particular day—Calabrio’s re-optimization function enables managers to reset existing resources and skillsets to ensure customers receive the best service levels with the available staff.

In addition, staff use Calabrio WFM’s mobile app to access schedules, check shifts, swap shifts, and submit and receive instant responses to holiday/leave requests.

With Calabrio WFM, Zen Internet realized a variety of immediate and sustained benefits around employee engagement, customer experience and operational efficiency.

Leaders make more informed business decisions that improve the contact center’s operational efficiency while helping it become more agile. The entire team saves a significant amount of time, especially when it comes to forecasting and scheduling—what used to take half a day can now be done in minutes. Anyone can easily drill down through data to answer complex queries, something which would have taken days or longer to do before. Automated time-off requests also decrease the amount of time the resource planner has to spend processing those inquiries.

Calabrio, in fact, saves the contact center so much time, leaders were able to increase from 12 to 75 the number of hours set aside each month for their employees’ personal development.

Far-reaching visibility—fueled by the ability to quickly access real-time data, at a click of a button—helps managers ensure the right number of people are in the right place at the right time, so agents are set to succeed, not fail. Managers can make informed decisions about assigning workload while forecasting any potential challenges that could come up during the normal, day-to-day operations of the department with higher accuracy.

And, agents are more engaged and enjoy more control since they can easily plan their personal lives around their work commitments using Calabrio’s mobile app.