With a Support team composed primarily of agents working remotely from all around the world, Shopify’s Workforce Planning team struggled to efficiently manage agent scheduling using a traditional, spreadsheet-based approach. Using spreadsheets, it  required far too many steps and too much time to create schedules and approve vacation requests.

Leaders knew processing vacation requests ate up more than 40 hours of the Workforce Planning team’s time each week. And they suspected a single person dedicated to managing agent scheduling using spreadsheets would need to spend four full weeks creating only three weeks of schedules.

Compounding the problem was the repetitive nature of the agent schedules. Often copied from one week to the next by workforce planners to save time, the resulting, monotonous schedules led to less-satisfied agents who craved more variety in their work routines.

Shopify’s Workforce Planning team selected Calabrio WFM to help their planners automatically generate schedules and process vacation requests.

They also used Calabrio to build and implement different scheduling guidelines optimised for growth across regions and languages.

Shopify’s Workforce Planning team now recoups more than 40 hours of time each week thanks to Calabrio WFM’s automated vacation processing. And each Workforce Planning team lead now saves several hours of time each week due to Calabrio’s automated schedule generation.

Workforce planners also increased the complexity of agent schedules—in many cases, tasking agents with five or more different activities per day—and can create and view different scheduling scenarios prior to publishing them, and use Calabrio’s up-to-date interaction volume insights to make real-time changes to balance queues.

Calabrio also enabled the Workforce Planning team to create different scheduling guidelines for different regions, so Shopify’s Support service could expand into new time zones and languages.