Author: Michael Gray

Introduction of Family-friendly Shifts

Operating in a fiercely competitive market, this leading insurer is under pressure to optimise every part of its business: people, operations and technology.

As a company that’s committed to its people, it is also keen to maintain high levels of employee engagement and low attrition – a task that’s made difficult by intense labour market competition in and around its two UK centres.

In 2017, as part of its comprehensive Employee Engagement strategy, the company introduced more family-friendly shift patterns within its contact centres – effectively ending shifts after 6pm as well as many weekend shifts.

While regarded as a positive move within the business, it also created a significant resourcing problem. How could it maintain long opening hours (8am – 8pm) when it had fewer people available to work the more inconvenient service hours being offered to customers?

First Homeworking Steps

Homeworking was identified as a possible solution and introduced within a satellite office. Around 120 people were given Citrix-enabled PCs and asked to work-from-home either part or full time. Unfortunately, the trial quickly faltered. Employees had received little prior warning about the move and many found it simply wasn’t for them. With little to no experience of what it took to manage a large team of homeworkers, Managers and Team Leaders also struggled in multiple areas from communication to scheduling, maintaining motivation & productivity, training and monitoring the health & well being of remote workers. The team of 120 people quickly dwindled.

A Pilot Project

It was at this point that the insurer turned to Sensée and, after extensive planning discussions, a 9 month pilot project commenced in April 2018.

The project involved over 134 Sensée advisors providing general phone-based customer service and sales support to the company’s car insurance customers.

Support focused on two key areas. First, evenings and weekends – a strategy that dovetailed neatly with the company’s new family-friendly shift policy. And second, plugging the small scheduling gaps that occurred during the day where the insurer didn’t have the right number of people available, with the right skills, to meet the expected volume and nature of contacts. Sensée’s ability to micro schedule was absolutely key in this regard. With its TeamTonic scheduling solution able to schedule right down to 30 minute slots, the Operations team could simply review its entire daily/weekly/monthly workforce schedule, identify the gaps, and use Sensée personnel to fill them.

It was a flexible approach that delivered significant advantages to the insurer when it came to the commercial arrangement. Rather than specify a precise number of hours required every week/month, it was able to call on Sensée resources via a combination of mandatory hours and on-demand hours using a flexible ‘interval slot delivery’ approach. It also meant that the company only paid for the hours that Sensée delivered.

Moving towards a Longer Term Partnership

Following the conclusion of the pilot in August 2018, the partnership moved forward with changes to the number of contracted mandatory hours, as well as changes in the commercial arrangement.

Under the new approach, the Minimum Contracted Hours (MCH) that Sensée was required to work could be flexed up and down by up to 20% to drive even greater scheduling flexibility, while the requirement to work evenings and weekends was dropped in favour of a mid-week morning focus.

Sensée continued to support the company’s car insurance customers as well as help its client with new business and service calls.

In addition, a new contractual arrangement was introduced that combined payment by productive hours worked with payment by performance. The latter involved a calculation of performance based on 20 key KPIs (from AHT to renewal rate, CSAT, NPS, Quality, New Business sales and more).

The partnership built successfully over the next year. And when the contract was renewed in August 2019, a new skillset was introduced – Renewals. By August 2019, the contract had grown to 212 heads (covering Advisors, Team Leaders, Deputy Team Leaders and Floorwalkers).

Over the next 12 months the Sensée team continued to overcome challenges and frequently went the next step to support its client:

Upskilling the team to email handling to assist during the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis when it was transitioning its own people to home working
Uncovering several ‘ghosting rings’ (where fraudsters have attempted to set up multiple cars on the same policy, or cover multiple drivers on a single policy) potentially saving our client thousands of pounds

Sensée’s advisors and Support & Management remained professional and positive throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and feedback from the company’s Internal Quality Team has regularly praised the efforts of Sensée’s advisors. Customer feedback has also been very positive.

2020 Sensée performance against key KPIs is presented in the table below:

Background

In 2016 DPD (UK) was looking to introduce a new supplier to support its customer services teams. It was looking for a partner focused on quality and who could provide a flexibility of workforce that could adapt to the changing requirements of a fast-growing and successful business.

Sensée was chosen because DPD felt it could provide flexibility and quality using its scalable homeworking model. The first engagement began in November 2016, with a requirement to ‘go live’ in February 2017.

Following the initial discovery, and a clear understanding of DPD’s requirements, a team was recruited. Virtual training was devised, and systems & processes put in place to support customer service delivery.

Day One

The Sensée advisers started an 8 day induction training on the 8th February, and took their first consumer calls on Monday the 20th February 2017. Once the team was up and running effectively, and achieving its quality and productivity KPIs, a recruitment plan was put in place to meet the retail peak in October and November. This entailed recruiting new teams from August and increasing weekly hours by over 400% within a 10 week period (850 hours per week to 4,000 by the end of November). This also involved changing the shape of the hours provided to ensure that service level was maintained and in accordance with DPD’s priorities.

In 2018, Sensée began to manage emails, including Investigations and Make it Right queues, which have a greater complexity and higher priority. Working with the DPD Planning Manager, Sensée has also been focused on call handling at specific times of day to ensure that the flexible resourcing model is optimised.

Measuring Performance

DPD manages its suppliers through a balanced scorecard methodology, with 5 specific KPIs around quality, productivity, service level and cost. Sensée averaged 95% against these criteria from June 2019 to March 2020, with consistently high levels of achievement in the following areas:

Sensée came to be seen as a trusted partner that provided insight to DPD in a transparent and honest way. This has supported DPD in its initiatives to improve customer experience and increase efficiency.

Anne-Marie Cunningham (Head of Customer Services, DPD UK) said ‘We are truly delighted with our relationship with Sensée. They are extremely flexible and adaptable to our changing needs, and also proactive in finding better ways of doing things on our consumers behalf.’

Key Partnership Highlights

• Sensée was able to overcome peak demand challenges in 2018, reducing email queues within 3 weeks of being made responsible for them. High productivity and queue management then maintained this level of service.
• While focussing on quality of service, Sensée has been able to deliver the lowest AHT scores across the estate through a focused approach to optimising call control. It achieved an AHT in Q1 2019 of 280 seconds against a 330 second target.
• Sensée has provided DPD with up to 25% extra resource in the form of just-in-time hours in order to cope with unexpected demand challenges. Sensée’s model allows home advisers to quickly sign up to those work hours deemed ‘more unsociable’ should the need arise, through the use of an annualised flex system. This has allowed DPD to move the Sensée resource quickly to problematic queues.
• The Sensée resource planning team has helped improve consumer call queues by working with DPD to analyse patterns and volumes. This led to the introduction of a peak shaving model which allows sites to work together collaboratively for maximum efficiency and takes advantage of the flexibility Sensée offers. Since the introduction, performance against SLAs has increased by 15% across the estate.
• Sensée has achieved an overall KPI performance level of 95% for the period July 2019 – March 2020, twice hitting the 100 points level. This composite score includes individual performance scores across KPIs for cost, quality, productivity and customer satisfaction measures.