Surprisingly, less than 20 percent of all credit union and bank branches use workforce optimization (WFO) technology—according to Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Saddletree Research. But that number is bound to increase as these institutions realize the true value of WFO solutions such as GMT Planet™. Case in point: Colorado-based Elevations Credit Union provides a compelling illustration of how GMT Planet helps break the apparent trade-off between service quality and staffing costs...by delivering the best of both worlds.
A member-owned, not-for-profit banking retailer, Elevations CU—with more than $900M in assets under management—serves approximately 80,000 business and individual members. Shunning the traditional product-centered approach typical of the banking and financial services industry, Elevations has instead opted to focus on serving as an unbiased source of consumer information to help members “sift through the hype and choose solutions that truly support their financial needs and health.”
In response to the evolving competitive dynamics of the financial services industry, Elevations CU realized that in order to provide members with superior service at competitive rates, they would need to seek new ways of operating more efficiently and productively. With more than 200 full-time staff serving members through the multi-channel service delivery system—consisting of telephone, e-mail, remote delivery, and loan and member service representatives in the branch—the organization needed to make the most of their limited resources, specifically in its contact center.
Before GMT, Elevations’ contact center was staffed by 25 agents who consistently answered about 77 percent of the approximately 280,000 calls received in 2005 in less than 30 seconds. However, management believed that a workforce management solution would enable them to drive service levels even higher, while at the same time reducing ongoing labor expenses through higher productivity. As a result, contact center management set a target for representatives to help members at least 72 percent of their scheduled work time.
“Unlike nationwide retail banks and other large financial services providers, we can’t rely on economies of scale to drive efficiencies. Instead we had to renew our focus on making the most of our limited resources by boosting productivity while simultaneously ensuring that members receive the level of service that they deserve,” explained Les Boothby, assistant vice president of retail operations support for Elevations Credit Union. “But you can only squeeze out so much from existing operations without the benefit of a technology like workforce optimization to level the playing field.”
Fast forward to solution deployment: After a lengthy evaluation and selection process of looking at the top WFO players, Elevations CU ultimately decided that GMT Planet offered the best fit based on the company’s needs and budget. As a powerful and flexible solution, GMT Planet offered Elevations CU a full range of capabilities for optimizing its contact center and branch operations, which represented significantly lower investment costs and an accelerated investment payback period. Working with Elevations CU team members, GMT’s professional services team went to work on implementation and deployment, capturing as much historical call trend data as possible—everything from talk time, to times of the year, seasons and days of the week—in order to begin creating the first forecasting and staffing models.
Moving from fixed to distributed schedules and breaks, agents and management quickly transitioned from their Excel-based, manual processes to automated workforce optimization with relatively little disruption.
“Because manual scheduling is a hard habit to break, there was a bit of a learning curve from a behavioral and change management perspective,” Boothby explained. “The hardest part in learning to use the software is to let the application do its job and trust the data. When you’re used to scheduling manually or using Microsoft Excel, the GMT schedules don’t look like they make sense.”
Before long, Boothby and the rest of the contact center became believers after seeing the dramatic improvement in forecasting and scheduling accuracy. Using GMT’s extensive reporting capabilities to detail the leap in performance, he proved to the staff just how much GMT Planet had increased agent productivity and service levels. By matching supply and demand—incoming call patterns with agent availability—GMT surpassed its once impressive benchmark of answering 77 percent of all calls in less than 30 seconds. As the forecasting models became increasingly more accurate with additional data points, the contact center increased its service level to answering 85 percent of all calls in 20 seconds or less.
Boothby elaborated, “GMT empowered the staff and improved scheduled adherence. The staff knows to follow the optimized schedule and notify us with exceptions. They’ve learned that by trusting the schedule, they can provide better service to members and work better with each other.”
And what about the other benchmarks? More than simply enabling Elevations CU to reach its stated goal of having agents on the phone helping members at least 72 percent of their scheduled work time, GMT Planet’s precision forecasting and scheduling capabilities enabled the organization to quickly surpass that benchmark. Within the first year of deployment, the contact center was operating at 80 to 85 percent productivity.
And with this dramatic boost in productivity, Elevations CU was also able to break the apparent trade-off between service levels and staffing costs. Its contact center operation was able to carve out a significant chunk of ongoing labor costs, reducing staff by more 25 percent within 18 months.
“We’ve seen a cascading range of benefits from GMT Planet in that our leap of operational efficiency has translated into not only higher service levels and reduced labor costs, but also increased member loyalty and bandwidth for lenders to answer loan calls,” he concluded. “Since our GMT deployment, I’ve fielded a number of questions from other credit unions considering investing in workforce management technology. I tell them that GMT is the way to go, offering exceptional value—GMT Planet is easy to use, affordable, offers timely technical help via email and web conferencing, and the overall quality and capabilities are phenomenal.”
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