DENVER CO –  When a fast-growing major financial services firm realized it needed help with its command center strategy, it called in the contact center consulting experts from Eventus Solutions Group.  Following a detailed analysis of their needs and infrastructure, Eventus delivered a managed service providing centralized command center services for multiple internal and outsourced contact centers. Along with delivering 99% accurate forecasts, Eventus has driven dramatic improvements in customer satisfaction, operating costs, and overall customer experience for the firm.

Creation of command center capabilities to support an increasingly complex organization is a major challenge for most rapidly growing contact centers.  Without the ability to accurately forecast future demand for customer support, both service levels and unit costs can suffer.  The customer care organization at this major financial services firm was struggling to keep up with rapid growth.  They had grown from a single site to multiple sites including internal, outsourced and international facilities. They had to support multiple product lines, multiple contractual service level agreements, and multiple customer segments.  Staffing levels had grown to 600 FTEs with seasonal peaks over 1200, with further incremental growth expected.

Inconsistencies in forecasting accuracy, staffing requirements, and ability to deliver on contractual service levels led to ineffective management reactions to unplanned volume fluctuations, inadequate staffing levels, ever-changing training needs, and unknown associated costs and budget impacts.  This reactionary environment resulted in sacrifices in customer satisfaction, reduced call quality levels, inadequate training time, fluctuating operational service delivery requirements, diminishing agent retention levels, customer experience, operational site performances and increased care costs.

These issues were key signals to organizational leadership that immediate action was required.  Specifically, they needed to formalize command center processes, implement a scalable management model and establish an infrastructure that enabled the ability to anticipate service levels, foster real-time management and predict costs in an evolving business environment. Knowing they needed help, the company brought in a team of contact center consulting experts from Eventus Solutions Group.

Following a comprehensive review of their existing operations and future growth projections, Eventus proposed they build a centralized command center to support all current and future centers, whether those sites be internal or outsourced.  Centralized command centers offer many benefits over multiple local command centers including the ability to:

• Optimize workloads across the enterprise, not just within one contact center
• Enable use of the champion/challenger model to manage multiple labor vendors performance
• Provide end-to-end insight across the entire customer journey, regardless of which contact center(s) handles the customers interaction
• Leverage rare employee skill sets and specialized technology such as workforce management and reporting analytics

While the company ultimately agreed with the recommendation to centralize its command centers, they continued to have a concern about their ability to execute the strategy on their own. So instead of building a command center themselves, they contracted with Eventus Managed Services (EMS) to deliver a complete, centralized command center as a managed service. The Eventus EMS team developed a tailored solution designed to complement the company’s existing capabilities.  Eventus then deployed a dedicated team working out of its hardened command center facility located at its Englewood Colorado headquarters.

From the day the service went live, the company had the benefit of a world-class team of command center professionals using best practices processes and technology to deliver forecasting, real-time adherence, reporting and analytics services for their growing network of contact centers. In fact, in a recent quarter, the Eventus team achieved 99% forecast accuracy, well above a standard industry target accuracy of 95%.  By optimizing resources across all their contact centers, the firm has seen a double-digit increase in customer satisfaction, while decreasing average handle time by 19%.  The EMS team also supported the transition from one outsourcing partner, whose quality and productive metrics badly trailed one of the firm’s other partners, to a replacement challenger who is now taking on the current champion.

“Centralized command centers offer many benefits for multi-center organizations, particularly those that are growing rapidly,” said Craig Tobin, Eventus managing director. “Our contact center consulting experts can show you how to build a centralized command center, as well as deliver this critical functionality to you as a fully managed service.”

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