South Australia Water Corporation (SA Water) is an internationally recognised water utility wholly owned by the South Australian state government. It is charged with providing fresh water and waste water services to South Australia’s nearly 1.5 million citizens. SA Water’s commitment to conserving scarce water resources dates back more than 150 years to its founding in 1856. Since then, SA Water has worked diligently to become a recognised leader in best practice water utility technologies. Its commitment extends beyond just water conservation as reflected in its head office, the recently completed SA Water House, the first building in South Australia to be awarded a 6 Star Green Star – Office Design rating from the Green Building Council of Australia – the largest commercially developed building in Australia to receive such a rating.
As with many public utilities, call volumes can be wildly unpredictable with call types ranging from service requests and billing enquiries to emergencies, such as water main failures and sewer blockages. To establish its service standards, SA Water maintains a written Customer Service Charter that contains an inbound call provision requiring all calls to the Customer Service Centre, regardless of subject, be answered within 20 seconds. Given the wide variety of calls it receives, the seemingly unpredictable arrival pattern of those calls, and its manual, time-intensive scheduling process, SA Water decided to seek a more systematic way to forecast call volumes and, more importantly, schedule staff to ensure it achieved its service level commitments.
“A source of pride at SA Water is the service we provide our customers,” said David Coombe, manager of SA Water’s Customer Service Centre. “They count on us for an uninterrupted supply of fresh water, as well as prompt service when they need it.” As part of its commitment to high-quality service to its customers, SA Water conducted a review of its business processes and procedures and identified several areas in need of improvement in its contact centre operation. Of all the findings, most glaring was SA Water’s incumbent rostering process, which was cumbersome and required about one day per week to prepare rosters for the following week. As a result, rosters were typically available for only a two-week time period, which gave agent staff limited visibility to their work schedule. To compound matters, the availability and time-off request process was also cumbersome and error-prone.
“We knew our then-current process was less than ideal,” added Coombe. “While our service commitment to our customers demanded that we have adequate staff at all times, our previous process often times fell short of our standards. We needed a solution that was well-proven in a public utility environment, provided highly accurate call forecasts and rosters, enabled our agents to conveniently view their work schedules, and, just as importantly, allowed contact centre management to easily address time off requests and manage the inevitable changes throughout the day.” To that end, SA Water invited the leading workforce management solution vendors to respond to a request for tender.
SA Water knew that compliance with its functional requirements would be only one factor in selecting a workforce management solution partner. The selected partner would also have to have a demonstrated track record of successful implementations and ongoing client care, including benefits measurement. In addition, it wanted a solution that could easily grow as the contact centre operation grew and could be extended to other departments within SA Water–such as its back office operation.
During its tender process, SA Water evaluated the leading workforce optimisation tools, assessing each vendor’s technology and its ability to satisfy SA Water’s functional and business requirements. SA Water also conducted detailed vendor reference checks by speaking with actual product users. Throughout this process, GMT worked closely with SA Water to understand its business requirements, goals and objectives, while communicating its commitment to work hand-in-hand with SA Water to ensure expectations were met. In the end, SA Water selected GMT because of how well its functional requirements closely matched the capabilities of GMT Planet’s award-winning workforce optimization suite, as well as its industry-leading client lifecycle methodology, SureServices.
“GMT Planet met – and in some cases exceeded - our functional requirements,” explained Coombe. “GMT worked with us to understand our technology decision.”
The GMT team worked diligently with SA Water to ensure its operational objectives were met, its contact centre management were adequately trained and that the system provided the benefits detailed early on in the deployment process. A key to GMT Planet’s successful deployment turned out to be the ease and accuracy with which rosters were created. Commented Coombe, “Under our old process, it took upwards of seven hours a week for our Team Leaders to generate a roster. And fairness, time off and intraday management were quite a chore. Once we implemented GMT Planet, we generated rosters in 30 minutes, rather than seven hours, and had unprecedented visibility into agent availability and time off.”
SA Water also reports a significant improvement agent satisfaction and productivity as a result of GMT Planet. “With GMT Planet, we are able to more fairly schedule shifts and improve the time off request and approval process. These are now automatically reflected in our rosters, and agents can access their roster from any computer with a browser. We’ve received an additional, unexpected benefit in that we are also able to tie our back office operations into the GMT solution. ”
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