When it comes to call centre planning, productivity and agent engagement are top priorities. For many firms, however, there are several challenges that can stand in the way – rigidity, shift inflexibility, time-off backlogs – to name a few.
This rang true for NatWest – one of the UK’s leading retail and commercial banks. When NatWest embarked on a mission to transform its contact centres, it faced several challenges:
- Transforming the colleague agenda was important to NatWest – ditching its one-sided, directional approach to scheduling and empowering agents with more autonomy over their own schedules
- Agents were often sitting idle during quiet periods, when this time could be used more productively on important “offline” activities such as coaching, one-to-ones, and training – all of which ultimately improve the customer experience
- Planning teams were spending too much time on “low-value” manual processes – time that could be much better spent addressing higher priority issues
That’s where Intraday Automation from QStory came in.
In our latest webinar, we spoke to Phil Baker, Customer Experience Lead at NatWest, about the initial roll-out of QStory across multiple contact centre sites – kicking off with 2,500 agents.
In case you missed it, here’s three ways Intraday Automation from QStory transformed NatWest’s contact centres.
- Empowering agents
With every QStory roll-out comes our smartphone App for agents. Free to download, this app allows our customers and their employees to view their schedules and access the QStory Self-Service Portal. Here, agents can swap shifts, flag when they are running late or going to be absent, request annual leave, and more – all within the parameters set by the business and automatically approved within seconds.
For NatWest, QStory’s smartphone app became a “one-stop-shop” for agents – empowering them to take more control over their schedules and be more involved in the decision-making process.
Used by 85% of NatWest’s agents in February 2022 alone, the app acts as a two-way communication tool allowing the business to communicate easily with its agent population while also allowing agents themselves to feedback any schedule changes they need to make – all in real-time.
This replaces the one-sided approach to planning, fostering engagement by granting NatWest agents more autonomy over their schedules.
2. More efficient for team leaders
QStory is the only contact centre solution with dedicated dashboards and reports for team leaders, delivering up-to-the-minute visibility over teams’ availability and scheduled tasks.
Using this portal, team leaders at NatWest can easily view their teams’ KPIs in real-time and all in one place – including attendance and adherence metrics. This eliminates a lot of the manual data input surrounding agent availability and attendance that team leaders traditionally had to endure when scheduling offline activities – such as coaching, one-to-ones, training, and team huddles.
Having all their agents’ data in one place also means team leaders at NatWest can focus on the behaviours that underpin CX delivery, identify problematic adherence performance, and determine where agents need training and support – as well as spotting star performers who deserve recognition.
For example, the portal allows team leaders at NatWest to instantly book training for their agents in a matter of clicks, and at times that minimally impact contact centre performance.
Using colour coded grids to highlight opportunities and threats to service levels, team leaders can easily view the best times to host training activities, with green squares to indicate optimal times and grey squares for times that aren’t available. The portal also allows team leaders to schedule activities without referring to the planning department for permission, making the process even more seamless.
With QStory, NatWest can re-invest agents’ free time where it matters most, unlocking great capacity benefits. In fact, in February 2022, NatWest was able to re-invest 3,285 hours in total – 604 of which went into training!
3. Fewer manual processes
QStory’s Intraday Automation replaced many of NatWest’s manual processes, taking these off planners’ hands and giving them more time to focus on adherence metrics and KPIs. Our advanced AI manages numerous “low value” processes in real-time – such as time-off requests and holiday administration – acting as an engine in the background to support planning teams with these otherwise time-consuming, day-to-day requests.
Before introducing QStory, planners at NatWest – both junior and senior – were bogged down by these processes, grappling with time-consuming batch files and excel sheets. Today, QStory’s automation alleviates a large proportion of these, allowing planners to react to more important challenges in real-time.
For example, NatWest was able to automate 2,400 holiday requests during February 2022, saving six days of manual admin for its planners. As a result, planners could focus on increasing call centre schedule adherence from 81% to 86% – meaning more agents are doing the tasks they’ve been scheduled to do, when they’ve been scheduled to do them!
To learn more about how you can drive efficiency, foster a happier workforce and deliver a better customer experience in your contact centre, watch the full webinar here, or get in touch on hello@qstory.ai.