Support Services Group operates a network of five contact centres across the United States, Canada and Latin America. Its agents are a talented mixture of multiskilled people who serve all customers and queue types in English, Spanish and French, and strive to deliver first-class service on every call.

In recent years, Support Services Group underwent a period of rapid expansion where the number of agents operating its international contact centres doubled, from around 150 to over 300. Most of these agents work full-time and handle a large number of voice calls and email interactions—an average of 5,000 to 8,000 on weekdays, 5,000 on Saturdays and 3,000 on Sundays. Their call durations can vary greatly—ranging anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes per call—due to the diversity of the organisation’s client base.

When their existing, complicated WFM platform failed to support Support Services Group’s large and complex contact centre operations during this period of rapid growth, contact centre leaders knew it was time to make a change. They needed to find a new, cloud-based platform that could support their unique business model—where shared agent teams use their varied skill sets to support multiple customer programs—and help drive the company’s future business expansion.

Support Services Group selected the Calabrio WFM cloud platform because of its web-based access; advanced reporting and multi-skill scheduling capabilities; and ease of use, simplicity, flexibility and intuitiveness.

With Calabrio, four experts within Support Services Group’s virtual WFM team now schedule up to 320 agents across five locations and four different time zones in the U.S. and Dominican Republic. They easily build 12 different shifts based upon agent availability over a 12-hour window while incorporating one Saturday or Sunday off, and one floating weekday off.

Agents can access Calabrio from their mobile devices to get real-time updates of their schedules, check their breaks and lunches, request shift trades and request time off.

Contact centre leaders credit Calabrio with dramatically transforming its contact centre operations, improving the work-life balance of its employees and boosting productivity 5% in a short period of time.

Now the company’s WFM team can add new skills, agents and clients quickly and efficiently. They can easily share tasks and workloads with each other, and seamlessly transition projects back and forth. And they can review and approve vacation requests infinitely faster than they could do with their previous outsourced process.

In addition, by linking Calabrio’s Intraday Management and Real-Time Adherence modules to Support Services Group’s automated call distributor (ACD) system, managers now have an accurate, real-time view into agents and overall contact centre activity. With this real-time insight, they can track schedules against forecasts and make quick, meaningful adjustments in order to meet client service-level agreements (SLAs). The real-time adherence to schedules enabled by Calabrio also enhances Support Services Group’s service levels and customer satisfaction.