As Registrar for over 700 companies—including around 55% of the FTSE 100—Equiniti manages approximately 24 million shareholder accounts. The company’s 4,000 employees also provide administration services for employee share plans, pensions and employee benefits schemes.

Theirs is a complex, important business. So, when Equiniti’s existing workforce management (WFM) solution was discontinued—and a costly upgrade still wouldn’t provide the flexibility and complex scheduling functionality they needed—Equiniti’s Customer Experience Centre (CEC) leaders decided it was time to invest in a new WFM system. And they knew they had to get it right.

To achieve efficient utilisation of Equiniti’s 400-strong CEC workforce, the new WFM system would have to be extremely flexible. It needed to help improve employee engagement—particularly regarding shift patterns and preferences. It needed to empower the Resource Planning team to make efficient client- and skill-specific resourcing decisions. It needed to be sophisticated enough to support dynamic shift patterns and preferences. And it needed to support Equiniti’s back-office functions, WebChat capability and social media interactions.

Calabrio WFM met all of Equiniti’s initial requirements—and more.

Now agents input via a desktop or mobile app their shift preferences and availability—which a scheduler then measures against the required service levels—and see their schedules a full four weeks in advance, instead of just two. Agents also can use the mobile app to submit and receive instant decisions on requests for annual leave, overtime, shift swaps or emergency holidays.

WFM planners use historical data—like call volumes or the profile of when higher volumes occur—as well as skills summaries to prepare future schedules. They also efficiently schedule against demand—for example, by choosing to fit all agent hours into a pre-defined, busy period to prevent from scheduling a surplus of agents during quiet times.

And, when schedules are inevitably and unexpectedly disrupted, planners simply run Calabrio’s re-optimisation function, which identifies skills gaps in a particular area and reschedules agents to ensure the best levels of service using the available staff.

With Calabrio WFM, accurate forecasting and optimal scheduling makes Equiniti’s contact centre more effective and efficient.

Flexible scheduling delivers higher employee engagement and improved service levels compared to the previous fixed-rotation method, with planners more quickly and efficiently producing optimal schedules based upon both service levels and staff preferences. Planners run “what-if” scenarios in order to understand precisely how the onboarding of a new client will affect their operations, and to schedule future events based upon historical facts and data, not guesswork—they can use data from the last five holidays, for example, as a basis for scheduling the next one. And, when the unexpected happens, planners can easily redeploy the workload to available staff who possess the correct skills. All of these scheduling improvements have improved adherence, increased visibility into adherence and delivered better adherence reporting.

Calabrio’s skills summary also enables CEC leaders to better identify areas of concern or opportunity. For the first time, they can view incoming traffic, performance and staffing at an individual skill level or collectively at a more holistic level. They also use Calabrio’s gamification features to better motivate contact centre employees—for instance, by gamifying Equiniti’s agent proficiency process.

CEC leaders credit Calabrio and its mobile app with making Equiniti agents happier, more engaged and better able to arrange their personal lives around work. Shift trade boards, for example, give agents schedule flexibility, while performance dashboards, gamification and improved reports empower them to self-manage their performance.