Once upon a time, a spreadsheet and the weekend were the only way to create a schedule at Oklahoma Natural Gas. The time involved in creating it weighed heavily in the decision to use one schedule for an entire quarter with fixed shifts, breaks and lunches. Unfortunately, call volume differs seasonally for ONG as the weather influences natural gas demand. This proved to be a serious problem when trying to match staff with call volume trends.

"When scheduling for a full quarter at a time, there is not much room for factoring in seasonal differences in call volume and high peak times throughout the day," said Scott Shepherd, ONG Call Center Director.

Shortly after implementing a workforce management solution SYMON calls

Contact Center COMMUNITY, ONG benefited by being able to match breaks and lunches according to call volume on a daily basis. Schedules became dynamic in response to actual contact center conditions. According to ONG, they were able to immediately improve customer service by monitoring and adjusting their scheduled coverage, especially during peak hours.

As ONG Call Center Manager Harvey Hightower stated, "The forecasting

and scheduling piece allows us to more accurately forecast trends and optimize agent schedules without spending

hours with paper and spreadsheets. What once took Scott or myself a full weekend, now only takes minutes. The money and the time saved are immense."

ONG experienced the following performance and productivity benefits and improvements when they implemented a workforce management program:

• Automated the time consuming manual scheduling process.
• Created total views of call volume and average handle times by time intervals.
• Provided quick and easy forecasting, scheduling and "what-if" planning.
• Gave management access to immediate exception tracking and logging.
• Gave management real-time adherence information to ensure proper staff load.
• Optimized breaks and lunches for consistent customer service.
• Gave valuable statistical information to synchronize headcount and workload.

Oklahoma Natural Gas Company (ONG) is a distribution company of ONEOK, a diversified energy corporation. The ONG Oklahoma City call center's daily operations consist of handling inbound customer service calls and e-mail requests for general service questions, service requests, emergencies, and billing. The center is open seven days a week servicing customers with approximately 75 cross-trained agents.

SYMON's products, including Contact

Center COMMUNITY, are currently installed in over 2,000 call centers, help desks, network control centers and data centers around the world. For more information, contact 281-240-5555 or visit www.communitywfm.com.

This article is the first in an EL&P two-part series on workforce management, CRM and service chain optimization. The second article will appear in the Nov. issue.