OTTO Streamlines Processes and Engages Employees with WFM Debut – Calabrio (UK)

OTTO Streamlines Processes and Engages Employees with WFM Debut

Simplified and
accelerated forecasting

Accelerated holiday planning
and approval processes

More equitable vacation
planning for all agents

Easy access to real-time schedules
from mobile devices

At a Glance

Company OTTO

Industry Retail Services

Region Europe

Products Used Calabrio WFM

About OTTO

Based in Hamburg, OTTO is Germany’s biggest online retailer for furniture and home furnishing products. The company sells more than 6,800 brands to more than 20 European countries, and has been voted by customers to be “the most customer-oriented retail service provider in Germany.”

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Accelerated, automated forecasting and scheduling increases manager productivity and agent satisfaction.

Challenges

Since taking its first steps into e-commerce in 1995, OTTO now generates well over 95% of its sales over the Internet. Last financial year alone, more than 6.6 million customers ordered online from OTTO, with peak periods seeing the otto.de website receive up to 10 new orders every second.

To maintain its reputation as the most customer-oriented retail service provider in Germany, OTTO’s mantra for communicating with customers is “personally, promptly and on all channels.” That’s why OTTO relies on a national network of 15 contact centres—or “relation centres”—that focus on delivering an exceptional shopping experience for customers around the clock.

Yet, despite OTTO’s e-commerce sophistication, not all of its customer service relation centres had adopted modern workforce management (WFM) practises. Some still relied upon manual processes to schedule and forecast agents, with many agents printing schedules on paper that likely became out-of-date before they were even looked at.

Solution

With Calabrio WFM, OTTO now builds schedules for 1,600 agents, who can check their up-to-date schedules at any time—and easily trade shifts whenever needed—directly from their mobile devices.

In a bid to better engage with employees, OTTO consciously decided early on that it wouldn’t immediately centralise all WFM processes—it was a mark of respect for the planners at each location who share a special relationship with their teams, and who understand what agents want, how they want to work and how the new WFM solution might support their individual needs.

The time for change had arrived. Our aim was to find one single
solution that was modern and, most importantly, could adapt to how our people wanted to work. After evaluating four products, we chose Calabrio WFM because it had the best vision for involving our agents.”

Stefan Schäff
Head of Support
OTTO

Result

With Calabrio WFM, contact centre leaders have significantly increased employee participation and underpinned OTTO’s change management process with a WFM product that works as it does.

Forecasting activities for millions of shifts are dramatically simplified and accelerated, as are holiday planning and approval processes across multiple shifts, work groups and locations. In addition, the transparency enabled by the WFM technology has made vacation planning fairer for all agents.

What’s more, OTTO is confident the time it has saved through all of this automation—although not the main business driver for selecting Calabrio WFM—has already covered the initial costs of the WFM project.

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