Update: Sharon Jones of National Debt Relief was named the winner! Stay tuned for a special profile of Sharon and her accomplishments.

Original post on all the finalists below:

It’s always wonderful to see our customers recognised as industry leaders. As companies are adjusting to the new way of working in 2020, the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals has recognised two Calabrio customers as finalists for their Workforce Management Professional of the Year Award.

Three cheers (and many more accolades) to the following exemplary professionals! Here are the profiles, courtesy of SWPP:

Christine Kolbeson, Rackspace

Christine Kolbeson is Senior Manager of Business Operations at Rackspace, a leading provider of expertise and managed services across all the major public and private cloud technologies. The organisation has 4 contact centres employing 1600 agents handling calls, chats, and tickets.  The centres use Avaya Chat, LiveAgent CRM, Salesforce ticketing systems, a custom-built ticketing system, and ServiceNow. Rackspace pairs Calabrio WFM with Amazon Connect PBX for modern contact centre forecasting and resource planning.

Christine’s team of five also built custom application programmeming interfaces (APIs) that pull tickets from disparate systems—including systems of newly acquired companies—into an interactive service queue, where ticketing processes are measured against multiple SLA tiers and then adjusted as needed. This combination gives Rackspace an automated, data-driven way of forecasting; scheduling; and synthesizing and managing support tickets—all to guarantee the right number of contact centre agents are available for customers at any given time. But the impressive, measurable benefits from Rackspace’s new WFM strategy speak for themselves:

• Grew forecasting accuracy rate to 96 percent
  • Reduced queue backlogs by 41 percent
  • Reduced latency by 29 percent
  • Decreased ticket volumes by 7.5 percent
  • Shortened hold times
  • Witnessed a corresponding, positive trend in Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Christine’s work and experience around operational discipline have been recognised, with the company recently promoting her to Director of Customer Experience.

Sharon Jones, National Debt Relief

Sharon Jones is Head of Workforce Planning for National Debt Relief, one of the U.S.’s largest and most reputable debt settlement companies.  The organisation operates three contact centres with 1500 agents utilising inbound and outbound calls and emails.

The technology used by the company includes Calabrio Teleopti WFM, computer telephony integration (CTI), Twilio Reporting, Ytica CRM, and Salesforce.  The WFM team consists of 14 personnel including 2 forecast capacity planners, 5 schedulers, 5 real-time agents, and 2 managers.

At the beginning of 2019 National Debt Relief (NDR) still used antiquated methods to try to manage a growing and highly expectant customer service workforce. No measures existed to help leaders understand how effectively and efficiently its 1,500 contact centre agents—spread across three states—handled more than 220,000 phone calls and 100,000 emails every month. NDR’s coveted customer satisfaction and expected future growth were at risk. Sharon developed and implemented a complete WFM strategy that resulted in significant, initial results in its first nine months of operation—the most impressive being a 3% increase in contact centre productivity from Q3 to Q4 2019, which drove a 15% increase in NDR’s bottom-line revenue during that same time period!

Thanks to Sharon’s work, NDR’s contact centres are optimally staffed to handle the incoming calls; its agents are better trained, compassionate and confident; and its customers experience smoother, more effective and reassuring interactions.

For more on the SWPP Workforce Professional of the Year Award, visit their awards page. Congrats to Christine and Sharon!