Spark Deploys Calabrio WFM to Support Unified Front Line Initiative

1,500

80 ↑

Number of people supported

A UNITED FRONT LINE INITIATIVE COMBINING CUSTOMER SERVICE LOCATIONS AND RETAIL OUTLETS

ENHANCED SCHEDULING EFFICIENCIES ACROSS 80 LOCATIONS INCLUDING 60 RETAIL OUTLETS

MOBILE CAPABILITIES INCREASE MULTI-CHANNEL AGILITY TO MEET FLUCTUATING CUSTOMER DEMAND

SELF-SERVICE APP IMPROVES WORK/LIFE BALANCE AND ENGAGEMENT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE STAFF

At a Glance

Company Spark New Zealand

Industry Telecommunications

Region Asia Pacific

Products Used Calabrio Workforce Management

About Spark

New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services company, Spark’s purpose is to help the whole country ‘win big’ in a digital world. The company provides mobile, broadband, and digital services to millions of New Zealanders and thousands of New Zealand businesses.

Enables leaders to quickly solve issues and deliver a much improved, much less stressful customer experience.

“Investing in the right tools is an important part of improving both the customer journey, and the employee experience. Calabrio’s unique industry experience of delivering unified workforce management functionality across an organisation’s entire frontline was a key reason we selected this solution. Furthermore, Calabrio’s advanced mobile capabilities provide powerful multi-channel agility to meet customer demand.”

Caleb Watson
Retail and Digital Operations Lead
Spark

Challenge

Around 1,500 staff at Spark serve customers across multiple channels from 80 locations in New Zealand including the company’s contact centre and 60+ retail outlets as well as home visits. This can be complicated when high call volumes coming into the contact centre are usually at completely different times from the footfall generated by customers visiting in-store.

Spark sought to improve the efficiency of running such a diverse and complex customer service environment. First, the company introduced a new way of working where employees are cross-skilled across multiple customer touchpoints and resources flow to where the customer is as demand requires.
To support this innovative Unified Front Line initiative, Spark selected automated technology from Calabrio, primarily for its proven mobile and real-time data capabilities.

Solution

Today, Calabrio’s workforce engagement management (WEM) platform supports 1,500 customer service staff, boosting agent engagement and the customer experience (CX) at the same time.

Spark replaced an on-premises workforce management (WFM) solution with automated WFM functionality from Calabrio that includes embedded Data Explorer reporting. The new Calabrio solution allows schedulers and supervisors to manage the workload of frontline staff quickly and efficiently and to accommodate peaks and troughs in customer demand across omni-channel touchpoints including voice, digital and in-person.

Frontline staff rely on Calabrio’s self-service mobile app, MyTime, to enter shift preferences, swap shifts and process automatic holiday/leave requests, as well as easily move their own lunches and breaks during the day. MyTime also delivers both schedule and performance information directly to their smartphones.

Meanwhile, dynamic WFM reporting capabilities provide team leaders with up-to-the-minute key performance metrics to their mobile devices so they can better support their teams, wherever they are.

Result

The deployment of Calabrio software has been critical to powering Spark’s Unified Front Line initiative. The cloud-first mobile-enabled technology has enabled Spark to become a trailblazer, seamlessly blending the right number of contact centre and retail workforce resources to meet the needs of a very different set of customers.

All customers now receive a consistent response and high level of service whichever channel they select, and employees have the opportunity to become multi-skilled by working in different environments. With employee engagement being a key priority for Spark, the Calabrio self-service mobile app, MyTime, is hugely empowering for customer-facing staff giving them greater autonomy over their work/life balance.
Meanwhile, the dynamic data-driven nature of the Calabrio solution provides leaders with the real-time visibility they need to make fast, intelligent decisions that closely engage frontline staff and positively impact CX.

Calabrio has proven to be a fully integrated agent engagement and CX tool. Since deploying Calabrio, Spark has reaped significant efficiency rewards that benefit the company’s 1,500 customer service staff, diverse customer base and the overall business.