To serve customers efficiently, Royal London operates from three business units supported by Group Operations. The company typically deals with over 2 million telephony contacts per year and 4 million multi-channel transactions (mainly consisting of email and hardcopy post) and this often results in up to 20 different touchpoints. Royal London needed a way to streamline processes and ensure the right agents were in the right place at the right time.

Before implementing Calabrio, Royal London relied on Excel spreadsheets to create agent schedules. It was a lengthy, drawn-out process. Each Team Leader often operated in separate silos with little or no communication between corresponding teams. These heavily manual processes and independent ways of working frequently resulted in forecasting errors such as holidays having to be overwritten and periods where agents with a particular skill set were not available.
Although Royal London had access to historical data from telephony systems, it wasn’t possible to extract that data and generate meaningful forecasts from it. This resulted in an inefficient and inaccurate way to organise seasonality planning, multichannel forecasting and shrinkage management.

Recognising the need for an automated Workforce Management (WFM) solution, Royal London kickstarted a ‘capacity planning project’ to help centralise resource planning activities across multiple teams, sites and functions.

To build a better customer experience and improve operational processes, Royal London implemented Calabrio Workforce Management, delivered by workforce engagement management experts Business Systems. Today, the solution supports over 1,000 agents – double the number supported at the beginning of the implementation. When the Coronavirus pandemic hit, all agents were on the Calabrio WFM system and working from home.

Royal London relies on Calabrio’s WFM functionality to integrate the company’s multi-channel interactions with telephony work and all demand volumes. By doing this, specialist areas have a combined view of the capacity plan so different teams can quickly spot broken workflows which need to be streamlined.

One of the main reasons Royal London selected Calabrio was for the solution’s preference-based scheduling abilities. This functionality allows Royal London to ask agents to specify several preferences for shift allocation such as start times, days of the week, or preferred working patterns. Leaders can then allocate the shift that best matches the agent’s requirements ensuring both staffing requirements and staff preferences are met.

Utilising real-time adherence, team leaders are alerted when agents are within or outside adherence thresholds, ensuring staff are available for the next customer demand/interaction and handle times are kept to a satisfactory level.

Meanwhile, agents and team leaders use the Calabrio MyTime Mobile app to enable scheduling on the move. The tool allows them to stay informed of upcoming schedules as well as changes throughout the day. Through the app, agents can also submit overtime availability, trade shifts and request holiday or absences.

The Calabrio solution plays a core part in boosting agent engagement, customer experience and streamlining operations. Contact centre metrics have demonstrably improved both internally for frontline staff and operations, and externally for customers.

From a scheduling perspective, administering individual team rotas now takes just half-an-hour compared with over half a day a week before the introduction of Calabrio WFM. Thanks to preference-based scheduling, agents and team leaders now have valid input into the workforce planning process and this builds engagement and trust. All in all, Royal London’s overall employee engagement score has improved from 78% to 83%.

For customers, the results are equally impressive. Prior to Calabrio, a typical turnaround time for emails was 5-10 days. Today, turnaround times are within 48 hours. Customer complaints around paying claims and call waiting times have also reduced drastically. Customer complaints about wait times have plummeted from 100-150 a month to around 5 per month. What’s more is the impressive increase in NPS. Royal London’s Net Promoter Score is now 64 making it a market-leader in the financial services sector.