Sabio, a contact centre services and solutions company, has designed and implemented a workforce management solution for Thames Water that has effectively doubled forecasting and scheduling productivity for its customer service operations.
Thames Water is the UK's largest water and wastewater services company, and the successful Sabio solution uses a single central planning tool – the Impact 360 Workforce Management solution from Verint Systems – to enable Thames Water to schedule all its 800 customer service employees across its contact centre and back-office operations.
Since fully going live with Impact 360 in March this year, Thames Water has been able to double the employees managed by its planning and scheduling teams, delivering a 100 per cent productivity improvement over its previous approach that relied on complex and inflexible Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The workforce management project was part of a major technology refresh programme delivered by Tata Consultancy Services, which also covered workflow processing and the implementation of a new ACD platform.
According to Will Brown, Head of Planning at Thames Water: "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.
"With Impact 360 we've been able to tighten our schedule adherence across both our contact centre and back-office operations, creating the equivalent of more than 10 employees' additional capacity through better overall time management," he continued. "A key benefit is the automation of previously time-consuming procedures such as holiday bookings. 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. Given the success of our WFM project, we look forward to extending into other workforce optimisation disciplines over the next few years."
"Thames Water's initial success shows the value of a correctly designed and implemented workforce management approach, as well as the importance of supporting the WFM toolset with strong people and process skills," added Sabio WFO Practice Leader, Michael Andrews. "Thames Water has also shown the benefit of extending WFM beyond the contact centre into the back-office, and expects to unlock significant value by having a single WFM view across its broader customer service operation."