World Travel Holdings has evolved through a variety of strategic acquisitions to become one of the largest online and offline leisure travel companies in the country. Today, the multi-brand travel distributor owns some of the most recognizable brands in the industry, including CruisesOnly, Cruises.com, Rooms.com, Vacation Outlet, CruiseOne, Cruises Inc., and Villas of Distinction. With four sales and service centers operating in Florida, Virginia, and Massachusetts, WTH employees over 400 agents (up to 500+ during peak season) who interact with hundreds of thousands of customers each year.
In 2004, to contend with the company’s fast growth—both in terms of revenues and number of customer interactions—WTH invested in a workforce management (WFM) system from a well-known GMT competitor. At the time however, neither WTH nor their vendor could foresee the challenges ahead deploying the new WFM system. Despite the countless hours invested in deploying and attempting to fix the system, it simply did not work. To their dismay, the forecasts and agent schedules generated by the system were “wildly inaccurate”, providing virtually no value. Worse, WTH had little to no success in getting meaningful help fixing the system from their vendor, who only offered to charge additional “training” or “consulting” fees.
In the end, it became clear that their new WFM system was not suited to the company’s complex routing and skill structure. Reflecting the changing economics of the industry, WTH created different agent groupings, including sales and service, as well as different categories of inbound agents. Adding to the complexity, they sold cruises under 30 different brands, each with its own set of promotions and associated policies, and also routed calls depending on the vacation type (i.e. short cruise , mass-market cruise, luxury cruise, vacation package). For instance, they needed to ensure that a lead for a high-value vacation or cruise package was routed to an experienced agent who was well versed in the intricacies of booking a complex reservation and working with a specific brand or promotional offer. Further complicating matters, in addition to the agents working in their four centers, approximately 40% of WTH’s agents were “at-home” agents with unique needs and scheduling availability.
Overstaffing to ensure adequate coverage resulted in unnecessary labor costs—a large component of their expenses—while understaffing resulted in customer frustration, and worse, lost sales and lost customers. The end result was that in order to match the right agents with their wide range of service needs and revenue opportunities, WTH needed an efficient, sophisticated way to centrally forecast, route, and manage the large number of variable calls flooding in each day.
Eventually, WTH decided to cut their losses, forced to revert back to their Excel-based system as a stopgap solution. In the meantime, however, their scheduling and forecasting remained extremely rudimentary—resulting not only in unacceptably low service levels (such as time-to-answer and adherence) but also higher labor costs and lost revenue opportunities. Already stinging from the lost expense and time invested in their first foray into workforce management technology, WTH was understandably reluctant to make the same mistake twice. But at the same time, the call for change grew louder with each passing day.
“After meeting with our initial workforce management vendor, we had high hopes and fully expected that their system would deliver what they promised,” explained Jeff Smith, WTH’s VP of sales and general manager. “Quite bluntly, it ended up a bust despite our best efforts. One reason for the failure was cost. Their system required such a high investment for the core system that we were unable to add all of the modules and functionality that were required to ensure success. A bigger factor in my mind was that their software was simply not flexible enough to meet the requirements of our complex routing and skills-based environment.”
Determined to find the right vendor and workforce management solution for their specific needs, WTH decided to take a more measured and thorough approach as they performed their due diligence. This time around, they had a much clearer understanding of the potential pitfalls as well as the right questions to ask. For one, they knew that they needed a vendor with the right technology that properly could address their multi-layered call routing environment. Further, they were in the process of consolidating their contact center switches, which only added to the overall project complexity since it required a high degree of technical flexibility. Finally, and most importantly, the company placed the highest priority on finding a trusted partner that was committed to working collaboratively and would take full accountability to ensure project success.
After a series of meetings and discussions spanning several months, WTH found that partner in GMT. Through these discussions and information gathering sessions, GMT representatives dug deeper to gain a detailed understanding of the limitations of the previous system and their specific needs. Among the key decision factors, WTH pointed to the flexibility of GMT Planet since it was clear that they required a high degree of customization as well as the support of GMT’s responsive and attentive professional service staff. “It’s no exaggeration to say that the difference between GMT and our previous vendor was night and day,” explained Smith. “Of course, the technical specs, functionality and all that were important, but what really sold us was that the folks at GMT were very forthright and asked good, penetrating questions, knew how to listen, and demonstrated throughout the process that we were in this together and they had no intention of allowing this deployment to fail. And to top it all off, they don’t add additional fees for ‘How To’ types of post-implementation support calls or even for product upgrades, which was extremely refreshing to say the least.”
Indeed, the deployment in the end lived up to the promise. After working hand in hand with WTH staff, the GMT team invested the time to understand precisely the detailed system and process requirements and was able to customize GMT Planet to map to those needs. With GMT, the company has gained the ability to “manage compliance and utilizations in real-time” within their network of contact centers, according to Smith. Today, WTH has the ability to centrally forecast and schedule all of their agents in their four contact centers, in addition to their large number of at-home agents. And with this unprecedented visibility and control, the company is able to drive accountability by focusing on the metrics that matter the most to regain control over the fast-paced and ever-changing environment in which they operate.
Designed to perform not only within the confines of the contact center space, GMT Planet was well suited for the demands of operating in multiple locations, managing an enterprise’s entire workforce, both inside and outside the contact center. Unlike other WFM solutions designed to operate in a traditional center environment—routing inbound calls to agents—GMT Planet is a much more open and flexible system capable of rapid customization to fit the unique needs of virtually any business. For example, with GMT’s Mission Control and E.T.C. (Employee Time Center), WTH is now able to use the new system to also efficiently schedule and manage non-contact center staff such as support and administrative staff.
As WTH managers quickly ramped up the learning curve and grew more comfortable with the nuances of the basic system, they were soon leveraging GMT Planet’s powerful analytics capabilities to drive business decisions. Since the company was constantly adding, renewing, and ending agreements with suppliers and partners, they used the system to run various “What If” scenarios to assist in decision-making, among other uses. Smith concluded, “We have a lot of moving parts at any time given the nature of our business. GMT has enabled us to gain critical visibility into our operations by accurately forecasting call demand and optimizing our resources so that we can pull it all together and quickly make course corrections as the situation dictates. They’ve not only delivered on the promise of workforce management, they’ve truly exceeded our expectations.”
