Following an extensive review of market solutions, MYOB selected GMT Planet workforce management. As a global provider of enterprise workforce and resource optimisation solutions, GMT met MYOB’s financial, business and staffing requirements. As Steve North explains, “We selected GMT because it was the only workforce management solution that met all our requirements – particularly those around realtime access to data no matter which contact centre our people are working in. We’ve continued to be delighted by GMT’s commitment to us - it shares our customer centric view and views the relationship as a partnership. From a development perspective, GMT has met our needs every time and resolved any issues we’ve had with integrating the solution into our infrastructure.” MYOB has successfully rolled out GMT workforce management in its Melbourne, Sydney, New Zealand and UK offices, working in partnership with GMT throughout each process, allowing MYOB to focus on getting its people to buy in to the new workforce management solution.Founded in Australia in 1991, MYOB delivers business solutions to more than 500,000 businesses and over 10,000 accounting firms worldwide. Throughout 15 years of rapid growth, MYOB has remained focused on empowering small-to-medium sized enterprises and equipping them with powerful, accessible and affordable business management systems and services as electronic bill payments and other financial services.
Over the last three years, MYOB’s contact centre operations in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the UK and China have developed beyond in-bound pre-sales and technical support to become more outbound focused promoting new services, renewals for contract services and actively responding to incoming leads. MYOB employs 350 full and part time people working within its two offices in Melbourne and Sydney and over 120 people across New Zealand, the UK and Asia. Supporting a worldwide operation 24/7 and shift patterns covering 07.30 to 21.30 in each region, alongside continued rapid growth, MYOB was facing new challenges in terms of supporting and managing its people.
Each day, MYOB contact centres take thousands of calls. MYOB’s Melbourne-based resource planning team manages the scheduling of shifts for all contact centre team members across the globe. Traditionally using Excel worksheets, the team was becoming concerned with the ability to accurately forecast against increasing call demand. MYOB wanted to confirm whether it was optimising FTE and people were being used as productively as possible.
Steve North, Contact Centre Operations Manager, explains, “We had no clear insight into how our people were being deployed, how their time was being spent, and no ability to monitor historical data on scheduling patterns with Excel, so were we over or under resourcing for call demand? Could we achieve the same, if not greater, service levels by making some efficiency changes? It was also becoming very challenging to manage shift scheduling and roster preferences using Excel.”
MYOB’s resource planning team reviewed how to resolve these issues, whilst providing greater insight into scheduling team members and meeting some key set targets:
Following an extensive review of market solutions, MYOB selected GMT Planet workforce management. As a global provider of enterprise workforce and resource optimisation solutions, GMT met MYOB’s financial, business and staffing requirements.
As Steve North explains, “We selected GMT because it was the only workforce management solution that met all our requirements – particularly those around realtime access to data no matter which contact centre our people are working in. We’ve continued to be delighted by GMT’s commitment to us - it shares our customer centric view and views the relationship as a partnership. From a development perspective, GMT has met our needs every time and resolved any issues we’ve had with integrating the solution into our infrastructure.”
MYOB has successfully rolled out GMT workforce management in its Melbourne, Sydney, New Zealand and UK offices, working in partnership with GMT throughout each process, allowing MYOB to focus on getting its people to buy in to the new workforce management solution.
The GMT workforce management solution has provided benefits to many aspects of MYOB’s business: considerable financial savings; time savings in the scheduling process for the resource planning team; and operational efficiencies.
With GMT Planet, MYOB can accurately predict and plan for resource levels in advance of requirements and match skill sets. Steve North explains, “When considering business goals or new initiatives, GMT helps us to predict how many additional resources we will need in the contact centre to meet sales goals. We now have a much stronger basis to justify investing in more resources in advance of expected demand. And we can more easily assess the accuracy of our forecast resource requirements.”
GMT can predict the dollar savings related to an optimised schedule, and also more easily project resource costs around absenteeism or annual holidays for budgeting purposes, ultimately helping management to account for personnel costs.
In addition, when it is necessary to utilise key people in other areas of the business, outside from their regular roles, GMT helps the resource planning team to set contingency plans in place. For instance, if one of the technical support team’s knowledge and skill set is required in the development of a new product, it may be necessary to transfer them into the Product Development team for several months. GMT’s scheduling capabilities can accurately plan for replacing this person, and predict the service level support over a period of time, setting in place contingency plans for the team member who has been seconded – whether this be for one week or six months.
People can now enjoy the flexibility of more varied shift rotations and GMT’s Employee Time Centre (ETC). GMT Planet has allowed MYOB to set up 13 week shift rotations. ETC can be accessed by MYOB team members worldwide, enabling them to manage their holiday and time off requests in real-time.
Now managers can identify how many people are actively taking calls and what skills sets are being utilised. The improvements to workload fit and forecasting accuracy has enabled a reduction in customer wait times, leading to greater customer satisfaction. In turn, this has reduced pockets of inefficiency or under-utilisation of skills and people, achieving better customer satisfaction and further cost savings. “MYOB considers GMT workforce management an integral part of its infrastructure,” explains Steve North. “It is difficult to quantify many of the results this solution has provided our company – for instance the sense of accountability it has delivered to our people. However, the GMT deployment has met many of the financial targets set, including reducing resource planning costs, shrinkage and optimising FTE. It has certainly paid back on the investment we made in the software and has provided valuable metrics which influence strategic business decisions.”
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