Mannatech is a publicly traded company (MTEX: Nasdaq) that develops and sells nutritional supplements, weight management products, and personal care items through a global network of independent associates and members around the globe. As one of the world’s largest multilevel marketing companies—after Alticor’s Amway and Herbalife—Mannatech keenly understands that success depends on the hard work of its over 500,000 Associates around the world who collectively account for over $400mm in annual sales.
With the heavy responsibility of supporting its Associates in all aspects of their networking, sales, operational, and administrative tasks, Mannatech’s contact center’s only task is to support their Associates (rather than fielding calls directly from end-customers). In this sense, the Associates are Mannatech’s “customers” since they bring in all of the company’s orders and revenue and are the only ones calling into the call centers. With so many Associates requiring a wide range of support needs, ranging from order management and fulfillment to questions regarding their commissions and incentives, Mannatech’s Texas contact center—responsible for supporting all Associates in the US, Canada, and South Africa—is constantly on alert to ensure that they have adequate coverage to minimize hold times. Compounding the challenge, the center operates in a skills-based environment, rather than a queue-based environment, since they support a diverse range of Associate needs. In other words, the center needs to ensure adequate phone coverage for each “skill set”, such as agents who can handle not only basic order processing but also support their Presidential Line or speak Spanish or French.
Clearly, forecasting and scheduling in this environment is quite a challenge. Using only a basic “staffing calculator”—a step above an Excel-based system in sophistication—the center’s management has not had the sophisticated forecasting and scheduling capabilities required to optimize service levels and agents. And without a way of capturing and leveraging historical call data, Mannatech’s contact center has relied on their basic staffing calculator to forecast calls—supplemented by basic factors such as timing within business cycle (e.g. last three days of cycle are the busiest because of commissions) and pure intuition and educated guesses culled from years of experience. Since keeping their Associates happy and keeping service levels high has always been the highest priority, the center has traditionally erred on the side of safety, scheduling additional agents when in doubt. And for the sake of scheduling simplicity and to maintain a level of consistency, agent work schedules, as well as breaks, were generally fixed. The end result was that although service levels remained high, the center often had overcapacity of agents on the floor at any one time—significant overcapacity many times—translating to unnecessary labor costs and a softer bottom line.
“Our core mission at our contact center is to support the thousands of Associates who call in and need support in whatever aspect of their business is needed so our focus has always been squarely on providing the fastest and most responsive service,” explained Rachel Nkollo, Call Center Project Manager for Mannatech. “And while we’re proud of the fact that our service levels are typically in the high 90 percentile, it also became clear that we were not operating as efficiently as possible. The real challenge and question was ‘How can we maintain our high level of service while simultaneously reducing labor costs?’”
After evaluating the industry’s leading workforce management solutions, Mannatech ultimately came to the conclusion that GMT offered not only the most powerful and flexible solution, but also the most affordable investment option with the quickest returnon- investment. “We looked at all of the so-called Big Guns of the industry and in the end, GMT gave us the total package—fulfilling all of our requirements with a full range of capabilities while at the same time coming in way under their competitors in terms of overall investment costs,” recalls Nkollo.
After the decision was made to implement GMT Planet, GMT consultants started the requirements and data gathering stage to understand Mannatech’s specific needs and user environment. In early 2008, the implementation team arrived and in just a few days, GMT Planet was deployed and began capturing call pattern data in order to create the first forecasts and schedules. After this initial data gathering phase, GMT Planet digested all of the relevant data points to create the first call forecasts and agent scheduling plan—taking into account the various call types, agent skill profiles, etc. From that point on, GMT Planet continued to capture additional data points to further refine the forecasting and scheduling models to optimize agent schedules and ensure adequate coverage. In other words, as time passed, the forecasts became more and more accurate.
Fast forward: In a matter of months, GMT Planet’s forecasts and scheduling has exceeded all expectations in terms of accuracy and ability to optimize agent schedules. By Mannatech’s calculations, they were able to maintain the same level of service (service levels remained in the high 90%) with considerably fewer agents. In fact, through natural attrition and agent turnover, Mannatech has been able to keep their high service levels with approximately 16% fewer agents on the phone at any given time, translating to a drastic leap in efficiency and labor cost savings.
“When GMT’s people came in to train us and help us customize GMT Planet, I’ll admit it was initially a bit overwhelming because the solution was so powerful and could be customized and configured to a huge number of needs and specifications,” said Dave Hoekstra, Mannatech’s Workforce Management Administrator. “But I was able to ramp up the learning curve pretty quickly and so not only has GMT Planet gotten smarter with time, I’ve also been able to continually tweak the system as I learn its nuances, to make our forecasts and scheduling more and more precise. The bottom line is that GMT has already enabled us to carve out significant cost savings and our investment in GMT Planet will continue to pay more and more dividends as time goes on.”
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