Accenture Meets Gold Standard Using IEX Workforce Management System

A Structured Approach

After an internal client quality and management assessment, Accenture determined the best course of action was to take a structured approach to ensuring its Bangalore centers were providing top-quality service and operating at the highest level of performance possible. As a first step, the company began the Customer Operational Performance Center (COPC) Gold Certification process, which represents the highest customer care standard in the world.

COPC auditors performed an initial evaluation of the technology and processes within Accenture’s India centers. The auditors identified three key areas Accenture must improve before the Bangalore centers could gain certification: workforce management, tracking and sustaining results and measuring the cost of poor quality.

When the auditors returned 6 months later, workforce management was the only area that still did not meet the stringent standards required for COPC-Gold certification.

Meeting Stringent Requirements

“The workforce management tool we had in place did not meet our business requirements,” said Bud Jordan, senior executive at Accenture.

The company cited several reasons the incumbent system wasn’t meeting demands. “When the system was selected, the decision makers did not envision the operation would grow into a multisite contact center environment as rapidly as it has,” Jordan said. “The workforce management software in place provided good post reporting on activities but it was not strong from a planning and execution perspective—which is critical in a large, multisite environment.”

Starting From Scratch

To help Accenture overcome barriers preventing its centers from achieving COPC Gold Certification, Accenture had to revisit its workforce management selection decision. “We created a detailed business case to justify replacing the workforce management system the company had deployed just 8 months earlier,” said Jordan. “We began by considering the capabilities of a workforce management system required to achieve our realistic business objectives.”

Setting Priorities

Staff productivity and utilization were the center’s top priority issues. “Our focus was to deliver a high level of customer facing time—with the least number of agents while maintaining our high customer satisfaction scores,” said Jordan. “That meant we needed the ability to impact real-time staff management within our sites at the enterprise level and required the capability to drill down to each unit’s contribution to goals.”

Based on Accenture’s needs, obtaining a system with strong multisite management, real-time adherence and intraday management features were key requirements.

Evaluating Systems

During the evaluation process, Accenture looked at all the top workforce management systems, dividing them into three main categories: diagnostic, interactive and control. Accenture classified diagnostic systems as those that enable the center to easily create forecasts and schedules but don’t easily allow the center to make changes once the plans are set. Interactive systems were considered those that give users the opportunity to make changes once plans are in place, but system capabilities are still limited. Control systems were classified as those that enable the center to produce accurate forecasts and schedules while allowing real-time changes to be made based on the actual day’s events.

The TotalView® Advantage

After a thorough evaluation, Accenture chose the TotalView® Workforce Management system from IEX Corporation. “TotalView was the only system that fit into the ‘control’ category,” said Jordan. “Other systems can be used in diagnostic and interactive situations, but TotalView is the only one with truly real-time capabilities.”

“We chose TotalView because the planning capabilities, intraday capabilities and analysis capabilities are seamless,” added Jordan. “With TotalView, as you make a change in one area, it automatically flows through to the other key areas.”

TotalView’s Intraday Management, Real-Time Adherence, Multiskill and Multisite features were cited as key during the selection process. Another feature of TotalView that was attractive to Accenture was its ability to support workforce management scenarios that aren’t necessarily common in the United States. The Team-Based Scheduling feature available with TotalView, for example, allows Accenture to schedule agents that live near each other to work during the same hours, which helps resolve transportation issues.

Aggressive Implementation Timeline

The deployment of the Accenture India TotalView system was done almost exclusively by FutureSoft, the local support organization for IEX. “They did an excellent job,” said Jordan. “We were working to achieve COPC Gold Certification and had an aggressive implementation timeline. We needed FutureSoft to compress what’s normally a 3 month deployment timetable into 3 weeks. They did a great job meshing their content knowledge with our schedule to make the implementation an on-time project and a success.”

Crossing the Final Hurdle

COPC Gold Certification was granted 3 months after Accenture went live with the TotalView system.

“While gaining certification was a real team effort,” said Jordan, “it’s clear that crossing the final hurdle would not have been possible without TotalView and the support we received from IEX and their partner in India, FutureSoft.”

Quickly Improved Management Efficiency

Once the system was installed, Accenture began to see results immediately. The centers were producing forecasts and schedules within the first week and began working to resolve agent schedule adherence issues.

“Before installing TotalView, we were always coming up short on staff availability because we didn’t have a good mechanism in place to keep track of our people,” said Jordan. “The system’s real-time adherence and intraday management capabilities have helped us achieve a number of huge improvements in terms of agent and management efficiency.”

Agent utilization improved by 30 to 40 percent. Occupancy has improved from 45 to 85 percent on average. Accenture dramatically improved its control of shrinkage. Initially Accenture was experiencing 33 percent total shrinkage. With TotalView in place, shrinkage has settled down at 19 percent. Schedule adherence went from 45 to over 90 percent and productivity increased by 22 percent on average per agent.

“From planning to intraday management to reporting, the TotalView system has given us the seamless capability we needed to gain visibility into our staff management operations,” said Jordan. “The feature set that helped the most is the multisite capability that allows us to create and manage a centralized staffing plan for the entire enterprise, and manage our staff at the local level. Being able to monitor the enterprise health and quickly identify issues leads to timely resolutions and improves overall contact center performance. These capabilities set TotalView apart from other workforce management systems.”

Benefits:

• Agent utilization improved by 40%
• Average occupancy improved by 60%
• Shrinkage reduced by 42%
• Scheduled adherence improved by 50%
• Productivity increased by 22%