Thames Water has doubled the efficiency of staff at its contact centre by implementing a workforce management (WFM) service from Sabio. The company can now schedule all 800 customer service employees across its contact centre and back-office operations.
The company says that it effectively doubled forecasting and scheduling productivity for its customer service operations due to the Sabio platform, which uses a single central planning tool — the Impact 360 Workforce Management system from Verint Systems.
The new platform went live in March 2008 and since then the water company has been able to double the employees managed by its planning and scheduling teams. This has resulted in a 100% productivity improvement. Previously, the company had been using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which Thames Water says were complex and inflexible.
Will Brown, head of planning at Thames Water, said: “Sabio clearly understood that effective workforce management involves the successful integration of people, processes and technology, and it’s their in-depth experience that has helped this project deliver such impressive results. Now with the Verint Impact 360 WFM solution we can use a single centralised tool to manage our major planning, forecasting and command centre operations, and we’re quickly realising the benefits.”
These benefits include automating tasks that used to be a time-consuming manual job, such as booking holiday allowance. “We’ve already processed some 15,000 holiday applications – providing agents with much more control over their schedules and freeing up team leader time significantly,” he said.
Brown added that the success of this project means Thames Water is likely to extend into other workforce optimisation disciplines over the next few years.
The WFM project was part of a technology refresh programme delivered by Tata Consultancy Services.
Sabio is a UK-based contact centre services company. Its customers include Sky, Orange, egg and Yorkshire Building Society.
