Finnish Tax Administration Gives Back-Office Ops Frontline Finesse with Calabrio WFM

10-20%

Decrease in back-office backlog

3,500

Back-office agents easily scheduled

Proper prioritization of work tasks

♥

Happier, more productive back-office workers

At a Glance

Company Finnish Tax Administration

Industry Government

Region Finland

Products Used Calabrio Workforce Management

About The Finnish Tax Administration

The mission of the Finland Tax Administration is to collect the right amount of tax at the right time from both private taxpayers and companies/organisations. The taxes collected by the Finnish Tax Admin fund important public services in Finland, like the state, the municipalities, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela), parishes, and forest management associations.

Applying frontline tech to the back office to solve an age-old resource management problem and achieve a superior CX, efficient operations, and engaging work environment.

“Almost every organization employs back-office people—non-phone workers—who research and handle the deeper-level cases resulting from daily customer service activities. It’s an incredibly difficult element to operationalize because there are so many more different types of workers and activities than frontline operations. But Calabrio WFM works just great for this!”

Anniina Laisti
Service Owner

Challenge

In 2023, contact center leaders at the Finnish Tax Administration considered their back-office operations a virtual blackhole of information.

During any given day, they never knew exactly what was happening. They never knew on which cases employees were working. No automated technology facilitated the forecasting/scheduling and work distribution for the 3,500 back-office contact center employees employed across 525 different roles. And, while dedicated workers did their best to manually process all incoming cases using spreadsheets and sheer force, the approach wasn’t fast or efficient—and it did nothing to boost their employee satisfaction or morale.

Leaders needed a way to improve the efficiency of the tax administration’s back-office operations while giving the employees who worked there the flexible schedules and improved work/life balance they deserved.

Solution

After witnessing firsthand how much more efficient and effective Calabrio Workforce Management (WFM) could make frontline forecasting and scheduling tasks, contact center leaders at the Finnish Tax Admin decided to make Calabrio WFM the new technology backbone of their back-office resource planning activities.

Now, Calabrio WFM powers all back-office operations for the tax administration, including all forecasting, scheduling, channel planning, and taxation tasks. Real-time work plans make back-office work less chaotic because they inform employees which work to complete and when to complete it, they put each worker’s unique work competencies to optimal use, and they take into account each worker’s specific requests and feedback.

In addition, with Calabrio WFM, managers now can schedule workers for more granular segments of time instead of just long, eight-hour shifts. And agents can use Calabrio WFM’s self-service scheduling tools.

Result

By using Calabrio WFM to properly prioritize and more quickly respond to taxpayer inquiries, The Finnish Tax Admin is delivering a better, superior customer experience (CX) than before.

Back-office workers now are more productive and feel more empowered because their back-office backlog is 10-20% smaller than it was before, they can easily handle daily volume changes (as well as the inevitable fluctuations caused by busy tax seasons), and every one knows exactly which work takes priority at any given time.

Back-office leaders are much more confident—and much less frazzled—because they can easily, optimally allocate workers and activities, and they know that even unique back-office tasks will be done in the right way, in the right order.

And back-office managers now spend their time leading, supporting, and coaching back-office employees instead of manually planning out actual work that needs to be done.

But leaders at the Finnish Tax Admin know their CX can be even better. And that’s why they’ve set themselves an aggressive goal of cutting their average resolution time by 50% within five years—a goal they’re confident they’ll meet with the help of Calabrio WFM.