Part of the Department of Public Works, CorpTech was established in 2003 to design, build and maintain corporate information systems that manage Queensland Government’s finance and human resources.
Its charter is to develop, implement and maintain the information technology infrastructure, processes and applications that are required for the Queensland State Government to run effectively and provide high-quality services to its citizens. By implementing standardised corporate service business solutions in this way, consolidating technology platforms and pooling resources and expertise, CorpTech enables its clients – shared service providers and State Government agencies – to achieve economies of scale and other benefits from standardising corporate services.
As is the case with all Queensland Government agencies, CorpTech must deliver quality services as efficiently and effectively as possible. In support of this objective, CorpTech performed a detailed operational efficiency analysis on one of it’s largest business units, Customer Service Solutions. The 2008 analysis found that the manual scheduling process being conducted within the business unit was highly inefficient, extraordinarily time consuming, and resulted with inaccurate staffing. Issues generated from this manual process were causing resource inefficiencies and negatively impacting on the Service Desk’s overall service delivery to its clients. For example, each Team Leader was spending upwards of 10 hours each fortnight creating schedules for their team. Workload forecasts were of questionable accuracy which frequently led to over- or under-staffing in the contact centre. As part of its mandate to provide high-quality, cost-effective services to its clients, CorpTech saw the need to improve performance in this area and added the acquisition of a comprehensive workforce optimisation solution to its 2008 strategic plan.
“We saw a clear need to look for technologies that would improve our ability to forecast workload in our contact centres as well as reduce the amount of time Team Leaders spent rostering their staffs,” explained Daniel Roberts, Senior Business Improvement Analyst with CorpTech. “Our standards of service are very high as our ultimate customer is the citizens of Queensland. We knew we needed to dramatically improve our service in this area.”
Armed with the results of its Customer Service Solutions analysis and its business plan mandate, CorpTech began its evaluation of the leading solutions available in the market. Through its prior experiences with technology, CorpTech knew that finding the appropriate technology solution was only one part of the puzzle. It needed to find a trusted partner who would offer the services needed not only to assure a successful implementation, but also to help create the necessary business processes to ensure long-term benefits realisation.
CorpTech performed a thorough cost-benefit assessment of the leading workforce optimisation tools, including those from Aspect, Verint, GMT and others. This evaluation included an assessment of the technology, ability to satisfy the business requirements of CorpTech and its clients, ability to integrate with CorpTech’s telecommunications infrastructure – the Broadsoft platform provided by Telstra – and detailed reference checks. True to its history of uncovering business goals as part of its pre-sales discovery process, GMT worked hard to not only understand CorpTech’s functional and technical requirements, but also CorpTech’s operational and business objectives, such as how a successful implementation would be measured. CorpTech ultimately selected GMT not only because of the close match between their functional requirements and the capabilities of GMT Planet, but also because of the GMT SureServices assured customer lifecycle success methodology.
“GMT certainly clearly distinguished themselves by virtue of how closely GMT Planet matched our functional requirements,” explained Roberts. “Of course, meeting our technical requirements was essential. But what really differentiated GMT from the rest was how closely they worked with us in understanding the business drivers behind our technology decision. They were clearly vested in our success and demonstrated the processes, services and references to prove their abilities.”
The deployment has more than lived up to expectations. The GMT team invested the time to understand precisely CorpTech’s detailed system and process requirements, as well as its operational objectives. A key success factor of the project was more accurately matching workload with the available resources, therefore creating more precise schedules. To achieve this, GMT developed a historical and realtime integration with CorpTech’s communication platform of choice – the Broadsoft automated call distribution provided by Telstra. Offered Roberts, “Creating more accurate forecasts was absolutely essential. Without them, the project would have virtually no chance of success. GMT worked closely with us and the Broadsoft to develop the historical interface necessary for us to produce reliable, highly accurate forecasts and to deliver a realtime interface which affords us unprecedented visibility into agent activity throughout the day. The result is improved service to our clients and achievement of our project goals.”
CorpTech also reports a significant improvement in the time it takes Team Leaders to create rosters. “Our previous manual process meant that Team Leaders were spending upwards of 10 hours each fortnight to create rosters for their teams. This was incredibly inefficient and took them away from higher-value activities such as agent coaching. Since the implementation of GMT Planet, rostering time is now measured in minutes instead of hours. Our rosters more closely match our forecasts, which mean a significant reduction in over- and under-staffing. I can’t say enough about GMT Planet and the GMT team. They truly delivered on the promise. ”
