| Research |
06.05.2009
Noble Systems Introduces Outbound WFM
Noble Systems announces innovative solution for outbound forecasting and workforce scheduling
Manchester, UK – 5th May 2009: Noble Systems, a global leader in innovative contact centre technology solutions, introduces its innovative Outbound WFM module for Noble® Workforce Management, a powerful and complete workforce management system. Noble Outbound WFM fills a void left by many WFM products which focus only on inbound communications.
Noble WFM provides a robust and affordable forecasting and staffing management solution that is easy to deploy for centres of all sizes. By incorporating forecasting and scheduling for outbound programs, Noble Systems provides a comprehensive workforce management system for inbound, outbound and blended programs that can accurately forecast call volumes, leverage flexible scheduling processes for both call and non-call activities for call centre and back-office personnel, produce reports that measure agent and centre performance, and reduce costs. Noble Outbound WFM offers features and tools targeted for outbound and blended environments, including:
• Outbound Forecasting for Agents to schedule agents based upon records to call
• Outbound Forecasting for Calling Lists to determine the resources needed to exhaust a list as quickly as possible or to spread calls evenly across a time period
• Inbound Forecasting to predict call volumes, including predicting “Valley” periods when inbound volumes are low so that outbound campaigns can be scheduled
• What-if Scenarios explore the effects of volume and service level changes
• Dynamic Agent Rankings based on actual performance
• Real-Time Schedule Adherence – Agent Status Monitoring and Instant Alerts for out-of-adherence states
• Data sharing with the Noble® Solution for outbound and inbound statistics, including historical data, call volumes, agent details, skills etc
• Integration to Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens, and other popular PBXs, and is compatible with other corporate systems and software applications
Noble WFM helps contact centres automate the process of forecasting call volumes and agent scheduling for outbound, inbound and blended programs, ultimately improving service levels and reducing costs. Workforce Management offers a number of benefits for a contact centre, including:
• Add instant value to your contact centre by receiving better information to make faster, more informed decisions
• Automate the laborious process of forecasting call volumes and agent scheduling
• Manage your workforce across multiple contact centres and time zones
• Optimise your workforce at a fraction of the cost and significantly build profitability
• Increase productivity by ensuring that the right skills are in the right channels at the right times
• Improve communication between agents and supervisors to view schedules, monitor performance and streamline common tasks
Colin Chave, General Manager of Noble Systems EMEA, said, “We’ve found that most of the traditional WFM solutions are lacking in features for outbound management. With the Noble Outbound WFM product, we deliver tools specifically designed for outbound and blended campaigns and workforces. We believe that our unique approach differentiates the Noble WFM solution from the competition. As with all of our products, Noble WFM is completely integrated into our Noble Solution contact centre technology suite, offering a unified, single-source platform for total contact centre management. WFM technologies can help contact centres quickly reduce staff costs by 20% or more and achieve a return on investment within a matter of months. By unleashing WFM for both outbound and inbound services, we believe our clients will see dramatic improvements in their abilities to forecast activity, manage staffing levels, and monitor performance, for all types of contact centre organisations.”
Noble Systems will be demonstrating Noble Outbound WFM at its upcoming users group conference in Atlanta on 12th to 14th May 2009.
About Noble Systems
Noble Systems Corporation is a global leader in contact centre technology solutions, providing innovative products since 1989. Every day, millions of customer contacts are made by agents at 2,000+ client installations worldwide using the award-winning Noble platform for inbound/outbound/blended communications. The scalable, integrated Noble Solution includes advanced ACD and predictive dialing; unified contact processing; and integrated IVR, recording, messaging, quality/monitoring systems, scripting, and real-time reporting and management tools. Based in Manchester UK, with our Head Office in Atlanta, Noble Systems was the first vendor to offer an open, scalable, fully-distributed platform. For more information, contact Sian Ciabattoni on 0161 772 7100 or visit www.noblesys.com.
Noble, Noble Suite, Noble Systems, and the N-logo are trademarks of Noble Systems Corporation. All others are properties of their respective companies.
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01.05.2009
Lower costs and higher service – six award winners share secrets of success
This week, six winners gained prestigious innovation awards for outstanding initiatives that improved their operations as places to work and to contact. The overall winner was television shopping channel QVC, with individual category prizes being taken by British Gas Services, Coventry Building Society, Kwik Fit Insurance, Thames Valley Police and Vodafone.
These prestigious awards, organised by the Professional Planning Forum, celebrate the achievements of the industry’s innovators and offer a benchmark of excellence within the industry. They showcase innovations that are transforming the experience of customers and employees and demonstrate how planning can make a real difference. The awards were presented at the 2009 Contact Centre Planning conference in London on 28th April, where each talked about how they achieved their success. In June these organisations are opening their doors as part of specially facilitated site visits within the Planning Forum’s best practice programme.
QVC was presented with the overall winner of the 2009 Innovation of the Year, not only for the impressive array of initiatives undertaken to create efficiency gains of several hundred hours a week, but also for a range of other pioneering efforts such as the successful implementation of home-working. Together, these enterprising programmes placed QVC in a league of its own.
“The most important thing we did was to stop and think: to reflect on how we did things and how the way we did things impacted on our teams and our customers”, explained Tracy Rice, Head of Planning at QVC.
The planning team achieved massive payback when they engaged the business and created time to implement change in 2008. Occupancy in the call centre improved 15% with recruitment of 46 home workers and a review of schedule efficiency. Extending this review to the distribution centre led to a 23% drop in agency hours. ‘At the click of a button’ management information, self-service employee administration and call causation analysis reduced Team Leader admin time from 50% to 11% of their working week, cut holiday queries by 23% and brought visibility of the customer experience into team coaching and process change.
“Put simply, this was planning-led transformation,” says Paul Smedley, Executive Director of the Professional Planning Forum. QVC formulated and carried out a programme of initiatives that together have had a huge impact not only on the call centre, but also on other departments such as distribution. “Every contact centre can learn something from QVC’s approach; that’s what makes the company such a worthy overall winner.”
The winners were selected by a team of judges who visited each of the 15 shortlisted organisations, and then assessed them against a strict set of criteria. “It was a tough contest,” admits John Casey, Director of Professional Development at the Planning Forum. “Every one of the organisations on our shortlist had award-winning components. Reducing the 15 down to six category winners was a difficult task. And that’s before we even started thinking about who should be the overall champion.”
Five further awards recognise innovation in specific areas:
The Contact Centre Innovation award for Customer Planning went to British Gas Services for the massive improvements they made to the customer experience - halving the number of missed appointments and reducing calls per visit by 26% through innovative use of telephone technology and text messaging to improve the customer journey.
The Contact Centre Innovation award for Back Office Operations went to the Coventry Building Society for the ‘Same Day in, Same Day out’ initiative which introduced a ‘front-line’ culture in the back office to clear backlogs, triple capacity for new accounts and break down silos in the wider organisation.
The Contact Centre Innovation award for Customer Focus went to Kwik Fit Insurance because of its ground-breaking establishment of a model company, Smart Co, within the wider business. This acted as a test-bed for new ways of working and through it Kwik Fit experienced a 37% rise in customer satisfaction and a 90.5% drop in employee attrition.
The Contact Centre Public Sector Innovation award went to the Thames Valley Police for introducing Primetime, which changed long-established work schedules with full union support. The new working patterns consistently raised service levels for all service lines substantially above national targets, for the first time, while at the same time they cut absence, dropped overtime budgets by 30% and reduced pressure at busy periods.
The Contact Centre Innovation award for Performance Culture went to Vodafone for ‘making customers fans’ – an initiative which grew revenue by 600% through building a performance culture, driven by employee engagement and a focus on just 3 key metrics. In addition to millions of pounds of extra profit and reduced cost per call by two-thirds in just 12 months, they increased employee engagement scores by nearly 22%.
The Contact Centre Innovation Awards were presented on 28th April at the Gala dinner at the close of Contact Centre Planning 2009 conference. The biggest ever conference, with a recession-beating 10% increase in delegates on last year, it continues to be a key event in Contact Centre’s managers’ diaries. Over 500 individuals were registered for the conference and the gala awards dinner.
Every year, the Planning Forum produces case studies, for all organisations on the Innovation Awards shortlist, and organises facilitated site visits to meet with winners and finalists - the idea being to provide its members with examples of best practice from some of Europe’s most innovative contact centre operators. Previous winners have included EDF Energy, Salford City Council, Tesco, HBOS, Norwich Union and T-Mobile. Contact the Professional Planning Forum for more details on any of these award winning case studies at www.planningforum.co.uk or info@planningforum.co.uk.
Press contact:
Katherine Potter, katherine.potter@planningforum.co.uk
Or John Casey, john.casey@planningforum.co.uk
Tel. 0333 123 5960.
About the Professional Planning Forum
The Professional Planning Forum is the independent industry body supporting effective resourcing and planning in the contact centre industry. Established in March 2000, we are supplier-independent and work across all industry sectors to provide specialist support for contact centre professionals who take resource planning seriously.
Our aims are to share and promote best practice in effective resourcing, support centre managers in developing their in-house planning and support functions, provide professional training and certification for analysts and specialists in these areas and establish better understanding and recognition within the industry of the role of resource planners and what is required for the role to work well in practice.
About the annual Contact Centre Innovation Awards
The Professional Planning Forum’s Innovation of the Year Awards offer recognition for work that has made a significant impact on a contact centre’s operation and strategic development in the last year. Contact centres have come a long way in the last ten or twenty years, but they don’t stand still! These awards exist to recognise the successful initiatives that are making innovative centres great places to work and to contact.
The Innovation of the Year Award 2008 was presented to EDF Energy for analysis of the root causes of customer contact that halved workload in key areas, creating a ground-breaking end-to-end service for new customers. Penny Wright, Resource Planning Manager at EDF was delighted to receive their award, explaining, “the work we’ve done and the award has totally changed how managers see planning”.
Salford City Council won the 2007 award for their Think Customer initiative, Tesco in 2006 for a programme of change that took the stress out of their Christmas peak period, HBOS in 2005 for developing initiatives to improve work-life balance and to Norwich Union Life Direct for "Project Eureka", which transformed their centre in just three months.
We offer these awards because we want to demonstrate how much is in fact possible and to offer case studies on how these improvements have been achieved. The Awards winners are all contact centres who have identified what needs changing – and delivered it - demonstrating significant change and measurable performance improvement.
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