Telia Company AB’s mission is to set its customer at centre stage, always at the core of the company’s efforts and vision.

Leaders want Telia customers to walk away not just satisfied with the service they received, but feeling that it went above and beyond their expectations.

One key way in which the company realises this vision: by aiming to provide star-quality service at every level of the customer journey through a unified, omnichannel experience—with channels including phone calls, digital communications and retail stores.

It’s an aggressive goal, especially for a busy, complex contact centre. Its 4,000 agents respond to approximately nine million customer queries every year. For efficient, omnichannel customer service, it uses the conversational platform ACE Premium Cloud to allow customers to choose the channel through which they want to communicate with Telia agents: by phone, email, chat or social-media channels. Agent-customer interactions are multidimensional, falling under both typical customer service queries as well as requests for technical support. To top it off, 5-7 agent skill levels are in place at any given time.

To make its customer-centric mission of providing world-class customer interactions a reality, Telia contact centre leaders knew they needed a workforce management (WFM) solution that would help them more easily manage their varied customer journeys and multi-skilled agents. But it also needed to be a solution Telia planners, managers and agents could begin using as quickly—and productively—as possible.

Telia chose to integrate its ACE Premium Cloud conversational platform with Calabrio WFM.

Contact centre managers use Calabrio’s intraday management capability to respond immediately to the unexpected changes that constantly occur in a contact centre—for example, agents calling in sick, leaving early or resigning their positions.

Telia’s contact centre agents use Calabrio’s online, self-service tool to request the shifts they prefer to work. They also use it to request and receive automated responses for time-off requests.

With Calabrio, Telia’s contact centre benefits from improved schedule optimization and higher agent adherence.

Agents appreciate being able to use an easy, online, self-service tool to request time off and select the shifts they prefer to work. They find they can better plan their social and family lives with the fast, automated answers their requests now receive.

But Telia didn’t stop there. After seeing Calabrio WFM’s success in its contact centre, customer service leaders decided to deploy the solution to improve their customers’ in-store interactions as well. By using Calabrio’s automated scheduling to manage retail staffing for its physical storefronts, leaders decreased customer wait times by 14% via increased employee availability. Now, customer service lines and wait times in Telia’s stores are shorter, and a more even sales schedule makes retail staff happier.