What Fuels British Gas’ Call Centre Automation Programme?

Currently run the real time team or command center as we’ve now, just recently launched it as, which basically is, in charge of the real time customer journey experience and the management of the employees over, our five sites mainly in the UK. Directly responsible for, obviously, the amount of time that customers can get through to us on the phones and then also what the staff do during their breaks and investment periods within that function as well, operate twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, So my phone is always on. Lovely. Take your vaccines. No worries. Thanks. K. Just a quick look at today’s agenda. Maxim will walk us through the business problem and business case specific to British Gas and the need intraday automation. And then she’ll be kind enough to share with us the some results from their implementation and learnings and some of the things that help drive success there. Then we’ll take a quick look at a couple of rules within the system to give you an idea of how intraday automation comes to life. And lastly, we’ll wrap up with some conversation about what’s next for British gas regarding workforce management in the command center. As I said earlier, there will be time for questions, at the end. So please drop presentation, don’t hesitate to enter those questions via the QA panel within Webex. And with that, Maxine, I’ll turn it over to you to talk to us about British gas journey. Okay. Thank you. So, we to start with, I guess, it’s good to understand why we brought in intra diem in the first place, and that was because we had a problem. And the first thing we need to do was actually under underpins what that business problem was and and write that down, really. So, within our services business within British Gas, our real time demands can vary. So we have a forecast, and it is a very good forecast during the week. We do this by, a long term short term and a ten day plan The slide that you can see there, the graph that you can see is an example of a particular day, and that forecast would have been planned ahead of ahead of time around ten days ahead. The problem with our business is that, whether it’s a significant impact and player in our call demand media is also impacted significantly, and, the engineers availability and when they can travel in including weekends and things that can determine sometimes and fluctuate what our in day demands are going to be. We also so there are lots of times where, again, as you can see on that graph, there is a little bit of surplus manpower something we can’t always pinpoint with accuracy when those half hour segments, the availability for agents is going to be. And due to the nature of the calls that we take, which at times can be customers that are very vulnerable and in vulnerable situations. We need to make sure we have lots of people available on the phone at any one time, but that does come with a risk of creating available time as well. And to try and utilize that availability, availability time can be quite slow, certainly from an in day perspective, how we communicate the staff, the sites in days to say we have some availability and do you want to take people off the phones to do things can take quite a long time to do? And the op the opposite to that is when we plan activities in, we can be hit with spy in weather or increase call demands, we then have to postpone or move some of that investment time out, which again is quite lengthy. And replanning that time back in can take quite a long time. So At times, that whole piece of work in the background, any kind of example of a fifteen minute course could take up to two weeks to complete planning wise as well as, maintaining and then changing that schedule. So it takes a lot of people. We’re we’re planning around sixteen hundred heads at any one time. Goes up slightly in the winter decreases slightly in the summer. It takes at least five month an hour days to schedule any kind of fifteen segment into our current plan to try and maximize when we can get people off the phones without risk of service. And then again, my resource colleagues love it when we’re busy, and I’m having to then cancel or postpone that investment and they’re having to do all that work again. So it it gives us lots of challenges, and that was really our problem. Is how can we better use our available time quicker, and how can we reduce some of the planned manned hours that we have in the background to try and attempt to get our customers and our advisors better served as quickly as we can during the the day, really. So once we’ve identified our problem, we then sent that off as a business case to, lots of companies introduced and came back And the the key thing as well, we wanted to make sure that we were focusing on was our priorities. Now safety and compliance is a big key focus for us in our company. Again, because we deal with a lot of boiler breakdowns and gas, situations. Getting somebody on the phone quickly, and then getting an engineer to them quickly is a real key business priority few hours. Customer satisfaction, obviously, with both companies, obviously, it it goes without question, but, we need to making sure that we have a great NPS score overall in our operational excellence is key for that. Again, growth strategy at the moment. We’ve got lots of different ideas, strategies, and briefings that we want to give our employees around better ways to grow our business. But again, getting that information to our advisors as quickly as we can, can sometimes be a a challenge for us. That was one of our priorities as well as cost efficiency. As well. Trying to keep things as simple as possible, and our people building our capabilities, getting more agents trained quicker on new products or new services or new processes that we’re putting into British Gas is the key that we’re trying to aim to to be our priority. And getting that information to them as quickly as we can is, it’s been one of those challenges when we are at busy times. So there are five five main priorities that we’re working on. And the response to that, obviously, is making sure that we can provide, feedback, coaching quickly We can train our agents, but then also track what they’ve had and when they’ve had it. That’s always, again, always been a bit of a slow process for us to get that information back as quickly as we can on our agents and when they have been trained, and how many people are still left to do and what WhatsApp sessions, it’s always been a challenging one for us to to try and overcome, providing effective and timely training and briefings, but again, the response that we got an update Our information on customers’ products and offers. Again, it’s it’s quite a challenge for us that I don’t get that in-depth information ready. Reducing waste as well. So we’re we’re doing a lot of duplication or have been at times doing a lot of duplication in how we plan and what we get as well as enabling our people to have those conversations. If we have noticed a spike in call demands due to increased weather increases for instance, getting that information direct to the agents so that they know that there is a weather outbreak or condition in a certain area, or there is an impact to a certain area that they can be advising the customers on on the phone without having to wait for that information to be provided is also, again, a key key focus for us and something that we wanted a solution for. So we put our business case together, after reviewing our problem and our priorities, we want focus on. And then, we went into our company to say, right. We, you know, we’ve got this technology at what can we do? We’re quite surprised really at how quickly, overall the, the momentum then got as soon as we started putting our business case together. Once we identified what problem was and the product that will be able to solve those problems, we then wrapped up into our, process of building our case to the rest of the business to agree, to set this up. So, we firstly started that back in February two thousand fifteen with some workshops with some of our key players in the business around what the challenge would be to the technology, can we support Intidium technology? Is that gonna be an issue? Was quickly followed up then by the resolution of that and how we could stimulate what that would look like. We then built up the knowledge by having sessions with Intidian. They came in talk to others about, some of the the challenges we thought we might face, which we clearly didn’t in the end, to help our business case, and we’ve worked out exactly which areas of the business we wanted to focus on. Again, we could have just, once we decided to go ahead with, the product decides to go across the big bang company, but because we wanted to see exactly what the benefits were, which streamline this into our services industry first because we thought that would be where we’d get our big wins. So we built with our business case in March, We then, got some support from our companies, leading key areas around what concept, what we would need to do. Next, which is to send some data after introducing to see what the benefits would be and how quickly we will see the the benefits back, which we got in April and May, two thousand fifteen, so very quick from our initial conversation to that April stage. Then in July, we went to some stay in group to finally, put some approvals together, and then sign the contract in December. So all in all, just a year to to, obviously, process and go through that journey, But during that time, making sure that we hooked up with our in our IS system first, our technology guys, We made sure we spoke to all of our key players first. We got everybody on board ahead of, starting the rollout so that everybody knew exactly what our plan was, what our benefits were, and then moving that into our deployment plan, which we started in January. So after we’ve done our business case, We then started going into that, readiness workshops for the following year. Once it agreed where we’re gonna go and what areas of the business we were going to to focus on. We then went into a series of workshops, which we did over the first three months of two thousand and sixteen. So in those months, we did a rule workshop, which was a real benefit for us to start with. We did some sessions around what we actually wanted to target our agents with, which for us, at the start of our program was investment time, unlocking potential of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty minute segments within our company, within our staff availability time, and sending a session to them. So it was about defining what that role would look like. How do we create that role in interim? And how do we get our agents to accept versions that are coming in that training content students. It was around also looking at what are key areas you wanted to focus on. If we want to make sure we maintain good abandon rates or greater service or indeed agent state, And that means an agent that is sat either in available. We only target them in that state or county target agents that are sat in a different state after call work or an idle state things like that. And to try and make things simple, what we actually did was you went ahead with, agent state was what we had personally agreed on first. So what that means to us is that although we have key metrics on abandoned rate and greater service, by allowing interim rules to only trigger agents that has happened available, It means that even at certain points of the day, if you have higher value rates at the start of the day, it then still delivers investments to agents throughout the rest of the day as your abandon rates are also coming down and you see agents unavailable. Without that in place, it would mean that we could potentially have periods of the day where you have got agents unavailable because your abandon rates or greater service or other target metrics are slightly higher, would then obviously mean that you’re still not getting that potential. So we agreed, really, on a rules workshop, around agency. We then discussed with our deployment teams on what content we would be putting through into them, who that would be, who our target sites would be, and confirming a communication plan and content workshop after that to make sure that, obviously, the side to me of what was coming and what would eventually the, landing on our agents’ profiles. So again, we have lots of, automation done with our training now. So agents can log on to a different separate tool. They can be shown videos and briefing documents straight to their desktop. We’ve had that in place for a couple of years now already. And interim rules meant that it would just give them the target link for that specific piece of content that we needed them to look at. Straight away without having to worry about getting briefing patched together and putting that content into the tool. So again, that made it very easy for us to come up with what we were going to deploy and who we’re going to deploy that to. We targeted only our frontline inbound agents in services during our, agreements to deploy first. Because, again, we felt that that would give us, some additional benefits on creating that available time. Our outbound and offline agents we decided not to do straight away because, again, it would be probably a bit more complicated to think about those rules, but we do have them in place now. So if anyone’s got any questions about that afterwards. I’m happy to to talk through those next. So that took us three months to just work out what we’re gonna do and how are we going to do it. And then the hard task, really, for us or we thought would be the hardest task, would be then to deploy the software into the company into all our agents’ profiles and get them to start using the tool. So we had a road map. We’re hoping to get this done over a three month period between May and August We expected it would probably take a bit longer. As with anything, there is normally some seating issues, we did to start with a small deployment based power, lesser office in the UK, firstly, which is where we’re all based as well, which was helpful, introduced and came to that event, and and we had some support from those guys on-site for that small pilot. That was to complete all our testing and make sure all that was ready. We could drop the software to the agent’s desktops. Without any problems, and we had no problems at all, with the deployment there. We then after we rolled out that small type, we started to put some of the comms plans training through and seeing how that’s our agents would see that content and how they would accept the rules. And then, for the rest of the two months, we took that small pilot and rolled out to our other sites. So we we rolled out to Lester in full, which is seven hundred staff in Eddington and our cardiff office, which is also an outsourcer. That was sixteen hundred people within that three month period we deployed and switched on to. Went very smoothly, no issues at all. Got lots of positive feedback straight away. I think it helped because we rolled out in June. Which is a summer month for us. So it was nice and hot. We had lots of availability. It meant we could be quite creative with some of the things that we pushed out through Interdim, which we’ll go through a moment, but I think for us, the the key here with our deployment plan was because we’ve put everything else in place beforehand. We’ve got our rules set up We had got all our workshops done. We knew who we’re gonna target. We’ve made our rollout a lot easier, and we actually finished ahead of time. So we had finished first week of August instead of at the end of August, just because everything went quite smoothly. So no issues really on our deployment journey. And then just to give you an idea of what we did on each of the days at the sites, we have interim team with us as well. They came around with us on board at all each of the events that we had. We had balloons and things that we gave out. So we, at every time an agent got offered a incident session. We started going around and giving them a balloon, which then throughout the course of the day meant that the office was building and building with of balloons across the day, so it was good to see how many agents were being targeted. And it was quite a a visual aid for us as well to see how successful that journey was going. We have three main rules running on the deployment day. We started off with an interim training session. We talked about this for quite a while in one of our workshops. Around how we would best train our agents on this new tool that we’re ringing in and how we would be doing that new tool, how would we train the agents? Would we have to still take them offline to do that training first? Which kind of, in a way, and you gave it the reason for interim in the first place? So what we did eventually was we came up with a training pack, so we would actually send that to our agents first. So the first experience they had of introduced following some, obviously, comms that we sent out previously, was an actual training event through the tool itself which instantly gave all of our agents, an understanding of intervene because that was the first experience they had. But also, realizing to to all our staff how clever the tool was in the fact that the training for the actual software came through the tool itself. So got some real positive comments back on how we chose to do that. We then also had a ten minute competition rule running So this was a rule that we created that, when our again, when our agents were stuck and available, it would send them a prompt to log off for ten minutes. They would come and find us. We were we had a big hub set up in the middle of the offices. They would sign up the phone, come and see us, and we would do some stitions and prizes that they could draw some, free drinks from the campaign, and we had some, cinema vouchers and things like that we gave out. And again, they were agents were just taken aback by the fact that they were being told by this tool to sign off. To do something other than training or taking inbound call handling. They were quite surprised and also very impressed with the fact that they didn’t need to tell anyone they were doing it. Because interdeal automatically wrote back into our our aspect e Wuffin program, their exceptions. So all they needed to do was come and win a prize, come and talk to us for a few minutes, isn’t a bit more insight into what the tool was gonna be doing and what the benefits were. And it also helped the agents to realize that this tool won’t just be used as a way of telling agents what to do all day. It’ll also give them an opportunity to have time available to do what they want to do So if we have pockets of availability, where we clearly haven’t got any training or investment coming up, then, we don’t have the issue or impact of worrying about what the agents do because we can let them sign off and do something more productive with their time. We need some emails or capture upon some offline work that they’ve been waiting to do for a while or indeed just coming in getting a price from us if if that was the case we’re doing. We then also run a call for a five minute communication. So again, that gave our agents in the the sites and the understanding that it, again, wasn’t just training, and it wasn’t just copy break. It was also five minutes to read any of the important emails that the company might have sent out that day or that week. Or just time for themselves, really, to just do a quick catch up with their team. So those went on each of the days, and then we left those running obviously, we we took the competition roll off, but we left the training and comms rule running at that site and went off to deploy to our next site. So and we also positively back from the first Thursday as well, and, quite surprised at how positive the agents were. We were a little bit nervous we would get from big brother is watching your comments. But I think because of the way we launch the day, and we did both the training events, as well as the competition time through the tool. It may be able to really understand that it wasn’t just at all what what you’re doing and be told what to do. There was also something that will give them some good benefits as well throughout the website that their their year working. So, went really well. And then, there was one challenge as everything. I’m I’m not trying to say that everything works amazingly. There was a couple of little niggles. The only one that we that was an issue was when we first did our small pilot in less than disinfecting. We had an impacted non agent state as in, it couldn’t to start with incident, couldn’t to start with understand or identify what the agent state was, whether it was at in wrap or in ready after call work or idle, that kind of thing. We decided though, because we wanted to get the benefits that we’ve run with that pilot to see what impact that would have. And actually, it gave us some real good understanding. So although we still saw, obviously, our success rate, our ignored rate, if you like, agents that were ignoring the pop ups that were being sent to them were slightly increased. It still meant though that agents were still accepting sessions when they needed to, and we’re still getting, call answered, which gave us an understanding that if in future, we are really busy and we’re going to have an expected challenging week, but we still have communications that we need to get sent. It opened us to the idea that we’ll still be able to use the system for that decision and be able to control that decision better by saying not only will we send availability information to agents and available. So we will also send that information when they’re in an idle state as well, which will give us this benefit, or it will actually impact our business in this way, and we can tell the company that’s ahead of the day. So we we can still control our metrics and our core volumes and our vendor rates. So It was a challenge to start with, but, the pilot identified that non agent state quite quickly, and we were still able to get that resolved before we did our full three site launch. So good to get that done as well, and have that pilot in place. Right now, we’re a year into the services operation now. We’ve been sending out lots of different sessions about forty three different events going out, since that year has started. But some very successful, training and content going through the tool now. And we have recently opened up to the the rest of the business, but you can see there on that slide that what that shows you is that during our winter months, we were very busy, and very challenging with, some of our call types because our winter months do get quite, quite busy. But we were still delivering investments. So it still meant that we were doing a lot better than we were before. I just wanna point out that my laptop is just, unfortunately, disappeared, but I have the slide back in front of me as well. So I’ll just quickly go to my notes. So we were still delivering sessions in the winter, which is really great. We still had lots of investments that we’re that we’re targeting. What we tend to do in our company is really only plan events between the hours of eight and six, Monday through Friday, plan activities. But because we are a twenty four our business. We let our rules run overnight as well as in day, which unlocked the potential that we’ve been missing for quite some time, which was We were capturing our early morning advisors and our late advisors a lot more than we ever did before. And again, got a lot of positive feedback from those advisors on the fact that they were getting investments that they never had before at times when no one else needs to be around. They were controlling that time themselves and having those sessions that normally meant we’d have to either bring them in on different shifts or, get additional overtime and to support some of our later shifts. So that’s really helped us that way. And then, the next slide, I’m hoping you can all see that next file. I can’t come can’t move that. I’ve gotcha. Perfect. And then the next slide is really around adherence benefits, what we’re doing next. So we’ve run through services, our investment over the last twelve months now with only investments. That’s all we’ve been using Internet for, mainly, pushing out additional twenty to thirty minute investment slots sometimes five or ten minutes left, and we’ve been looking to see what are the benefits can this tool give us. One of the things you’ve been running for the last six months now quite successfully is our adherence rules. What that means for us is it can pinpoint and tell us when an agent is in a certain state. So if they’re in after call work for more than a certain amount of time, it can send a prompt to either us with a real time command center to tell us what our agents are doing or actually directly to the agent themselves to ask them the question. Are you Do you need to still stay in this state? Is everything okay if you need support, or can you go back into ready and take the next call? That in itself, that one rule that we put in with, again, just our team at Lester to start with to trial that that rule gave us a ten second in reduction in AHT in the first week that we put that in. And that was mainly driven by the prompts being sent to the agents to them that maybe they shouldn’t be set in that state for as long as they happen. We obviously reviewed our departments before we put this rule in, and we’ve always had an expectation of how long agents should be sat in after call work, what activities they should be doing after call work that already gave us our metric and our targets something that, again, over the winter months, we may need to increase slightly if they’re having a more challenging conversation and instantly decrease in the summer months, which you can do through the tour quite quite quickly. But to see that benefit, just over that one week in one area, in one site, which is tremendous. So we’ve launched that with all of our sites down. Again, has seen that ten second standard reduction. There are times it can go up to fifteen Second, sometimes, depending again, it’s about eight. So approximately at least an instant ten second reduction on AHT just by putting that rule in. We’ve then started looking at transfer roles now. So agents that are transferring to other parts of the business that could also be quite busy. They’re getting a prompt with an with an information guide that says, should you be transferring to this department? Here are all other alternatives for you to handle that customer in a different way? Which is really coming along quite successfully now. And, we also have one about an idle state. We don’t really use the idle state very much in, sir, in our company. But if agents have accidentally reconciled in a different state, it again recognizes that state that they’re in and sends that prompt to the adviser to say are you sure you should be sat in whichever state you’re in. So again, it’s just giving giving agents. It’s not a big brother aspect again, we we got some feedback from our agents on whether that would actually go well, but a lot of our agents are seeing not only the benefit in their own individual target. Just by getting that much. But it’s also they’ve been saying how handy it is because sometimes if they’re distracted or they’re talking, They don’t realize that they’ve been setting up for that. But long the time, it doesn’t three minutes, depending on what you’re doing, can can either fill up a lifetime or fill very quickly. So in a call center in the industry that we’re in, three minutes is obviously very quick for us, but can be very long for agents. So it’s really helped to reduce their time and and to get the benefit back from the staff and the positivity again is just something that we didn’t expect him as a a a good thing as well for us to do. So they’ve got those running now across all of our three sites. And then this year, because of how successful those benefits have been in services, we’ve now rolled out to and seven thousand users in British Gas. That includes our energy side of the business and some of our small business enterprise side. So lots of work done there. So I think I’ll take a a small moment here just to to get back out, and I think Dave is gonna go through what those rules mean now and how we put those into practice. Yes. Wonderful. Thank you, Maxine. Okay. So we’ll take a quick look at what a couple of rules, that Maxim just described would look like in the system help bring it to life quickly here. So our first example is, of a training delivery rule, and this is what we call a free frequency based rule, what that means is that the rule is triggered on a frequency of every five minutes. So every five minutes, it’s looking out across the WFM and ACB systems to identify if it’s the right time to deliver training or communication sessions to the agents. Along with that frequency, we have a couple of what we term conditions. So these are the things that we’re looking at across the ACD and WFM. In this case, we’ve decided to go with agents available by queue, greater than or equal to ten. And we also have serve service level percent by Q, which can be customized to the threshold that works best within each individual business. Assuming that both of these conditions are met, what happens next is what we call the action. And in this case, the action is delivering an activity session, which could be training, communication, any sort of offline activity, delivering that to the agent desktop. You identify the percent of users to deliver to, how long the prompt stays, and the type communication that you’re delivering. So that’s a quick example of a delivery rule. We’ll also take a quick look here at the adherence rule that Maxine mentioned, then this one’s a much simpler rule, as you see, it’s really just a trigger and an action with no condition. This is a trigger that we call a state trigger. So in this case, we’re looking at time and current state exceeding a certain threshold. For this sample, we’ve chosen after call work, speaking specifically to the use case at British Gas, and we’re identifying where an agent has been in after call work for more than one hundred and twenty seconds. When that event trigger is met, we’re actually sending a question to the agent asking them if they need assistance. Kind of automating that outlier management that we often have to try to do real time by watching canvases or follow-up with after the fact using Metro six. So that was very quick. I know, but if you’d like to learn more about intraday intradium and intraday automation, you can go to forefront dot intradium dot com to learn how you can get a closer view. It looks like we do have a couple of questions. I think Maxine, if you’re good with it, maybe we’ll just go straight to our first question. And then, for the sake of time, probably follow-up on the other questions individually. Will that work for you? That’s fine. Yeah. Wonderful. Okay. So I think, we got a good question here for you that was about your other ideas and plans to use intraday automation to help reward and incentivize agents. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes. So we have lots of performance metrics, obviously most companies will have with, around our agents’ growth targets, average handle time, how they are QA assessed. That information currently is stored centrally in, a kind of Excel based spreadsheet. We’re taking that information now and putting that straight into the tool itself. The rules that are going to be built around the metrics of those tools, those scores. I. E. If an agent has achieved a great QAil score quality assessment, they would automatically get a ten minute segment of the phones to have a coffee or go get somebody from the campaigns and stuff like that. Those of all can be generated automatically by the data we put into interim again. It’s it still will support the if we’re really busy obviously, that session won’t go ahead on that particular day, but those agents are then automatically locked into a when we have availability, they will get a reward. What we’ve also done is, alongside that, once the agents has been triggered and accept that ten minute segment, the rest of the team get sent an email to say that that agent has, had that ten minute segment. And again, that’s been done through support from the managers across some of the sites. We don’t roll it out everywhere as yet, but, it’s been launching again in our Lester office at the three three months now. I mean, we’ve got lots of positivity. The agents are starting to see some rewards for their hard work and efforts and we’re looking to reward other agents in different ways around those metrics as well as other things that we’ve got going on volunteering activity days and things like that. We’re also looking to create a mobile app and utilize that facility with Intraline. So agents can decide if we’ve got overtime available. We can put that message for Intidium. They can accept that over time. It’s automatically put back into their schedule, and then they can just come in and do that over time, which, again, we’ve always been struggling to to get everybody’s contact details into a certain tool to do that kind of information. That’s another benefit for our agents, but they’re not missing out on overtime requests when they’re not in on a particular day. So just a couple of examples there of some of the the benefits of rewards that we’re doing. Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. I think, you know, earlier you mentioned, not wanting the agents to feel that it was big brother looking over their shoulders. Right? And those reward and incentive types of rules are a great way to manage against that and make it something that they look forward to getting versus, something that they dread you come across their desktop. So wonderful and ex exciting future plans. Yes. Okay. Well, we appear to be at the top of our time here. So for those of you who sent additional questions in, please know that we will follow-up with you individually, of course, and we will send out the cording from the webinar. So Maxine, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story. Fascinating to hear about the journey that British Gas has undertaken. To implement Intraday Automation, and we really appreciate it. That’ll work. Thanks very much. Thanks, everyone. Bye.