During the COVID-19 health crisis, like many healthcare organisations, Paris University Hospitals (Europe’s largest public hospital with 100,000 employees), feared becoming overwhelmed. It introduced a digital app that allowed local residents to monitor their symptoms from home and report them remotely to their doctors on a daily basis.

To manage the new COVID-19 monitoring app, the hospital built a brand-new contact centre to register and keep in touch with new patients, facilitate form-filling and trigger alerts to medical staff at the hospital for urgent cases.

Top challenges included recruiting and training hundreds of volunteers to staff the new contact centre, in just a few weeks. The next hurdle was to develop efficient schedules that took into account volunteer availability as well as their preferences and then communicate their schedules to them quickly. At the same time, the provision of real-time Workforce Management (WFM) data and analysis capabilities were critical to supporting effective resource planning and forecasting during a rapidly changing pandemic environment.

Success of the COVID-19 monitoring app project depended on effective workforce management and capacity planning, including the implementation of Calabrio’s automated WFM solution.

Webhelp chose Calabrio for four main reasons. The solution was simple and easy to use for everyone, essential for volunteers who had various levels of technical competency and often no previous contact centre experience. The intraday real-time management capabilities and long-term forecasting functionality of the Calabrio system were major assets. This functionality enabled Webhelp to accommodate last-minute schedule changes while anticipating future workloads and modelling for various scenarios in line with evolving pandemic requirements. Furthermore, as a mobile app, users could carry out a variety of WFM activities remotely, using their smartphones.

Webhelp maximised the Calabrio WFM solution to build efficient schedules that took into account volunteer preferences and other important resourcing aspects such as car-pooling (or sharing transport). These schedules were automatically generated and communicated in the Calabrio system. Meanwhile, volunteers used the Calabrio MyTime app to keep updated with their latest schedules and request shift swaps.

Easy to use and fast to deploy, the Calabrio WFM implementation tangibly supported what has become the biggest telemedicine experiment ever at Paris University Hospitals.

Webhelp benefitted from the automated scheduling, forecasting and WFM data analysis capabilities of Calabrio. Using the mobile app, Paris University Hospitals successfully onboarded more than 180,000 patients onto the COVID-19 monitoring app, involving 3,500 doctors and volunteers.

The flexibility of the solution has enabled Webhelp to create an agile resource capacity and planning framework for Paris University Hospitals. Using Calabrio, Webhelp was able to recruit hundreds of new volunteers across a variety of channels including telephone and email as well as popular social media messaging platforms including Slack and WhatsApp. They could train volunteers swiftly and remotely and then schedule them using 10 different shift models.

The self-service capabilities provided by the Calabrio MyTime app were a huge bonus. While giving volunteers control over their own schedules, the MyTime app proved to be a powerful motivational tool. Keeping volunteers connected and engaged at all times inspired them to deliver an outstanding customer experience. In turn more than 94% of patients said they were reassured by the COVID-19 monitoring programme.