With 80 different nationalities—using 40 different languages—staffing its global contact centers, Rentalcars.com faced a complex task of scheduling and sourcing talent made more difficult by the manual way it was handled.
Planners who still used spreadsheets often spent four days of intensive manpower preparing advisor work schedules, then spent even more time making any changes that came about. As Rentalcars.com’s business grew, so did the number of contact center advisors it employed—and so did the scope of its contact center scheduling issue.
Its scheduling problems were compounded by the complexity introduced by Rentalcars.com’s global, seasonal business where the majority of activity takes place during 8 to 10 weeks in the summer. The company’s contact centers needed to be staffed by multiple, multilingual workgroups—plus a mix of full-time and part-time employees—and all advisors had to possess in-depth knowledge of and experience with the car rental business. These prerequisites made finding the right people to work as advisors on a temporary basis for short periods of time a difficult and expensive endeavor.
For that reason, and to deliver outstanding consistency in customer experience, Rentalcars.com prefers to rely upon its existing, experienced staff to work additional hours when needed. But it needed a more flexible, automated workforce management (WFM) solution to drive it.
