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upon manual processes to schedule and forecast agents, with many agents printing schedules on paper that likely became out-of-date before they were even looked at.

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.

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.