Addison Lee is London’s leading premium minicab firm. The rapidly expanding company is committed to implementing best-practice technology solutions to support its growing business. The company completes up to 20,000 jobs on any given day, with bookings handled by approximately 300 agents. Most agents are based at the company’s contact centre in central London, with 85 home agents located across the south of England. These agents typically take over 100,000 calls each week, but this number can at times jump to 40,000 calls per day during holiday seasons.
When Addison Lee brought on Chris de Souza as call center manager, he was able to see that while the company’s contact center was operating successfully, there was still significant opportunity to optimize its performance by applying the latest workforce optimization strategies and techniques. “Having set up and run a number of contact centers both in the UK and overseas, I wanted to make sure that Addison Lee’s operations were running as effectively as possible. Key to this would be the successful implementation of a best-practice workforce management solution,” he commented.
“Given the volume and flexibility of our call patterns, it had always been a major task to ensure that we had the right number of agents in place to handle Addison Lee’s varying frequency of customer reservation calls. Our approach to scheduling typically involved getting as many agents as possible into the contact centre whenever we knew it was going to be busy, and then hoping that we had enough in place. While this ensured we were always able to offer a high quality of service, it also meant that as a business, we were paying a bottom-line penalty due to overlapping shifts, excess occupancy, and unplanned overtime,” explained de Souza. “As a consequence of this approach, we were having to allocate a large proportion of our time to resource management. Three of our specialist managers worked on this — two of them, full time — using a complex spreadsheet to schedule all our shifts, manage staff holidays and schedules, as well as provide forecasts of activity levels,” he said.
The company needed to be able to improve its agent occupancy while making the scheduling process more efficient. This required better planning and forecasting of call volumes and staffing levels. “In previous roles, I had worked with a number of different workforce management solutions and had a good understanding of the kind of software that could help us create optimal schedules for the business,” de Souza said. “We were confident that workforce management could make a big difference for Addison Lee’s contact centre, so we carefully researched the market to identify a best-in-class solution.”
The company selected Verint Media Recorder® Workforce Management following a successful three-month trial. “Our assessment was that, of all the solutions available, Verint Media Recorder delivered the most comprehensive performance functionality,” de Souza explained. “We were particularly impressed by how easy our agents found it to use on a day-to-day basis.”
Verint Media Recorder Workforce Management is part of the Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization solution. It provides a broad range of functionality, including forecasting, scheduling, strategic planning, agent self-service, scorecards, and eLearning.
