Amplify Your Workforce Optimization Strategy
Have you filled a prescription at a pharmacy or through mail-order recently? It’s a process that seems simple enough.
However, for a leading prescription benefit management (PBM) company that fills almost two billion prescriptions annually, it requires a lot of synergies among people, processes and technology so the process is smooth and efficient.
I recently met with an executive from this PBM company who shared his thoughts on how to enable greater productivity and more effective processes in the contact center and across the enterprise. His group supports more than 4,000 contact center agents, back office data entry and process staff who fill around 30 million prescriptions annually.
Because growth through acquisitions and mergers had created numerous system and process integration challenges, his primary focus was to drive process and productivity improvements through a carefully planned change management strategy.
As a heads-up, for those of you reading this blog who are contact center executives, I think there are some powerful takeaways from this story. You can leverage your group’s skills and competencies to help amplify workforce and business optimization in other parts of your organization.
Similar to the scenarios in contact centers, forecasting and scheduling of back-office processing and data-entry personnel at the PBM company were previously completed using spreadsheets. By leveraging the Enterprise Workforce Management solution and supporting processes, the company was able to more efficiently plan, forecast and schedule employees to meet service level goals.
This solution provided holistic visibility into and manageability of the work, people and processes. The executive also said that enterprise WFM “gave us time back—we now have more time to analyze performance and course correct intraday vs. just generating schedules.”
With many systems in use, the company also lacked the tools and insight into employee performance to provide the level of informed, data-driven decision-making they desired. So, the company leveraged Verint Desktop and Process Analytics to provide visibility into how employees use different systems, applications and processes to perform their work.
They were then able to capture time spent in applications, map processes to streamline them, and reduce variability, errors and re-work. What were some of the results?
The company:
- Drove more effective work categorization, enabling it to better align work with employee skills and availability
- Identified large-scale, work-associated idle time opportunities—idle time was previously as high as 40 percent
- Created transparency and a common language for performance discussions
- Changed behaviors to focus more on production-related activities and achievement of performance goals.
The net: Recapturing idle and non-productive time, plus other business optimization areas, resulted in savings of more than $6 million over 12 months.
Have you considered looking into ways to leverage your workforce optimization solutions and practices in other parts of your organization?
Quite often there are off-line groups, work processing teams and other areas where there is a large opportunity for optimization, but no one has introduced the tools and expertise to drive improvements. Finding and addressing these areas can amplify current workforce optimization efforts—and potentially your career—when you help drive workforce optimization across the entire enterprise.
The post Amplify Your Workforce Optimization Strategy appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.
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