Case Study: How Accor Global Reservation Centre Balances Cost Savings and Customer Experience

Hi, everyone. This is Vicky Harrell, executive director of SWPP, and welcome to our webinar today. We’re gonna give you a case study about how a Accor global reservation center balances cost savings and customer experience. And we are so excited to have our friends from Accor with us today. Louise Andrew and Gerard Cormier are with us from Accor up in Moncton, New Brunswick where Luis said it was fifty two degrees this morning. It’s gone all the way up to seventy seven when we here in the south are gonna be in the high nineties today. So, and we have Larry Swift with us from Intradiem, and we are excited to have all three of you with us this morning. We’re gonna have some interactive questions today, and they wanna wanna hear from you. And I want to make sure everybody knows where to give any feedback, so we wanna use the chat on the bottom right hand side of your screen. So if you look at the chat and pull that up and make sure it says send to everyone, And then put in there where you’re listening from and how many agents you have in your organization so we can make sure everybody has the chat up and is ready to respond when, they get some, questions from from the team up here. Alright. Shannon was first up. Yay, Shannon. Thank you. Oh, we got five thousand plus, thirty thousand plus, forty, around a hundred. Rachel, that looks like the temperature right now. Eighty five. Alright. Looks like you guys are getting that in there. So, again, just put in there where you’re, listening from and, how many people you have. That’d be great. See in Nebraska with three thousand. I’m also in Nebraska. Alright. Well, I’m in Nashville too. So, Rachel. So, we got a Calgary, Alberta. We got somebody way out in the west there. Louise? Winnipeg. Yes. Oh, I did. I was yep. Winnipeg as well. So alright. Well, y’all keep putting those in there, and, I’m gonna go ahead and turn it over to Larry to get started. This webinar will be recorded, and we will be sending out a recording afterwards. So if you want to share it with other people in your organization who were not able to attend, you’ll be able to do that. Larry, welcome, and glad to see you today. Yeah. Thanks, Vicky. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining today. My name is Larry Swift. I head up our solution consulting group here at Intra Diem. As Vicky said, we’re really excited to hear from Luis and Gerard and really talk about their journey with Intra Day automation and Intra Diem. Luis, you wanna give an intro? Sure. So Louise Andrew, I’m the director of workforce planning. I’m also a member of the, board of advisors with SWPP. Been around for a long time. In fact, Gerard and I have been here since day one of our contact center that opened back in nineteen ninety five. And so we’re, we’ve been using InterDEM for seven years, and we’re really excited to tell you about all of the success that we’ve had. Gerard? Hi. My name is Gerard. And, like we said, we’ve been here for a very long time. I’m the operations analyst here at our global registration center, and one of my, main task is the administrator of our InterDiem solution. Great. Thanks, guys. Before we get started, I think we had a we’re gonna do a poll question. So the question is, do you plan to invest in automation of manual processes? Again, this is a general question. As you think about your contact center and a lot of manual things that are going on throughout the day, whether with the agents or your operations, do you plan to invest in some form of automation? And the the answers are in the next six months, six to twelve months, twelve to twenty four, or not currently seeking automation. So we’ll give it about thirty more seconds. Alright. Let’s go ahead and see where we’re at with, with the answers on this. We got a couple we got a few more people who are right in the middle of it. So let’s wait just a couple more seconds. Perfect. And then we’ll close the poll. So get your answers in there, and we will see what everybody said. Alright. Looks like most everybody is finished. It’s gonna take just a second to close the poll, but it looks like people that are gonna do it are doing it pretty quickly. I don’t understand why it takes so long for these poles to close, but here we go. So sixteen percent said in the next six months, and then fourteen percent in the next six to twelve months, then three percent with the next answer, and then not currently with six percent. Excellent. Alright. Great. So so really why we asked that question is what we’re gonna dive into today is a form of automation that, Luis and Gerard are gonna share their experiences with. But before we do that, I just wanna level set, really what Intra Dim is doing today. I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know, but contact centers are continuing to get more complex each and every day. From an operational perspective, they’re dealing with either fully remote workforce or some form of hybrid workforce. More complex calls are coming into the contact center simply because companies are investing in digital, incentives to allow the easier calls to be automated while the more complex comes to the contact center. From a workforce management perspective, nothing’s really changed over the last twenty years. You’re really focused on planning and forecasting and getting the accuracy of that. Now as we look at the frontline agents, what’s going on is burnout. There’s not enough development time for these agents, so they’re constantly having calls coming through and it’s leading to burnout. When we looked at that from a customer lens and all those things I just talked about, what that leads to is inconsistent experiences and a lot of repeat calls. So if we go to the next slide, good news is there’s a solution for that. If you’ve never heard of Intra Dim and trying to figure out where it fits in your contact center ecosystem, I often get asked, is this, RPA play? Is this next best action? Really? What is this? The reality is it’s a brand new silo in the tech in the contact center that’s really become mission critical. It is not replacing anything in your contact center today, but rather now a compliment that sits in between your WFM and your ACD. So if we go forward and talk a little bit more about the specifics of those integrations, From an ACD perspective, it’s two different integration touch points. First, we integrate and get the, skill and cue stats every few seconds to understand the the volume that’s coming into the contact center. We will get things like how many calls are in queue, what your longest call waiting is, do I have agents available. The second piece of that integration allows us to see agent phone state. So at any given second, we understand what an agent’s doing, whether that’s talking to a customer and for how long, if they have a customer on hold, or if they’re in after call work as an example. Having the insights to that data allows us to have the pulse of what’s going on each and every second in the contact center. From a WFM perspective, it’s a two way integration. We intake agents’ schedules, so we understand who’s working when, but also any predefined events on their schedules. Things such as breaks and lunches as an example. Now one of the, use cases that Luis and Gerard will talk about today is delivering training and communications. Now, as you imagine being able to do that ad hoc when a training or communication is delivered to an, agent’s desktop. The second piece of that integration allows us to do a real time write back to the agent’s schedule in WFM. Again, this is all with no manual intervention. As we talk about what’s possible with these integration touch points, understand that we we know that contact centers are very sophisticated. So we have the ability to be very flexible with rules to get very granular in our rule sets to really attack very specific groups inside a contact center. So let’s go forward one. Now the good news is we are not tied to a specific ACD nor a WFM. As you see here, we have out of the box integrations with all the major ACD and WFM providers, not only on prem, but also in the cloud too. So with that being said, I’m gonna go ahead and hand it over to Luis now to really share with us her experiences, with Intradium at Accor. Great. Thank you, Larry. So a little bit about, Accor. So we’re a world leading hospitality company, that actually has over forty hotel brands. So in North America you’ll be familiar with Fairmont Hotels, probably Sofitel, no hotel. Those are all part of the accord network. We’re now at well, over five thousand hotels around the world, eighty eight hundred thousand rooms globally. And with the hotels, that are currently in the pipeline for the coming two years, we should be hitting a million hotel rooms around the world. So it’s very exciting. We’re in over a hundred and ten countries. And within our hotels, we have more than ten thousand restaurants and bars, and we have three hundred and thirty thousand employees globally. Our own operation here, in Moncton, as I mentioned earlier, we’ve been open since nineteen ninety five. We have approximately one hundred and forty reservation sales agents. That number includes a small group of customer care consultants. We service our North American guests that are traveling globally. So Accor has other third party reservation providers, in other parts of the world, and we have a sister contact center that opened in the last year, in Barcelona, that’s handling some of our European business. But our particular center, has been around for twenty nine years. When we started, we were much smaller. We had twenty six hotels. We were known as Canadian Pacific Hotels. And so through a lot of acquisitions and changes over the years, we’ve seen this tremendous growth, which has been very exciting. I’ll turn it over to Gerard and he’ll tell you a little bit about our specific operations that we have here, at the Global Renovation Center. We can move to the next slide. So currently, today we’re at about ninety percent home based agent. That wasn’t always the way. When we started the when we opened the originally the call center, we were actually one hundred percent, center based. Home base, probably didn’t exist for many companies at that point in time. Over the past ten to fifteen years, the number of home based agent, has, increased steadily. COVID kinda forced us to go one hundred percent home base. And today, we are sitting at about ninety percent, of our agents. So we went from, from a space perspective, we went from busting at the seams to now having extra space. So, and I’m sure we’re not the only one in that scenario. The WFM provider that we use is also known as Aspect. And our, ACD provider is Avaya, and that will soon be, Nice c x one. So we’re looking forward to that as well. And, our calls are inbound only. And the type of calls we do are either hotel reservations or customer care calls. That’s, in a nutshell, our, environment, and I’ll send it back to you, Larry. Yeah. So so before Luis and Gerard go through each use case, I wanna give just a little background of what exactly they are. So we’re gonna start with training and communications. So, if you think about a day in the life of your contact center today, if a training has to be completed, typically, what we hear is the procedure around that is something along the lines of the training team will contact workforce management, let them know what the training is, how long it is, when it has to be completed, and who it has to go to. The WFM planning and forecasting team will then go into the WFM system and plot out when the right time is to do that out in the future based on historical call volume. Couple of things with that. When you do do that, obviously, you’re predicting, arrival patterns are gonna be the same as in the in the previous way, but what can happen is cancellations and reschedules. The other thing that can that happens is this is going to your shrinkage bucket, your unproductive time you’re having to pay for time off the phone. Now what these guys are gonna talk about is this paradigm shift of leveraging, interdiem pulse on what’s going on right now in the contact center when there’s buckets of idle time that happen automatically delivering these trainings, communications, other activities in the moment, and now removing that from preplanned shrinkage requirements and pushing it through idle time. There’s a lot more benefits above and beyond what I just explained, and I’m gonna turn it over to Luis to talk about that. Great. Thank you, Larry. Yeah, there’s so much I can say about what we’re doing with these dynamic deliveries. And if I kinda go back seven years, and I think of our Pre interim days, you know, I’m, I’m glad we’ve moved on from that, but I’ll give you an example being in the hotel reservation business. We welcomed our hotel, teams to come in and do some product knowledge with our consultants. But what would happen is it would be, you know, this isn’t a good week. That’s a good week. We think this is gonna be a good week. So people book airplane tickets and they make their way to Moncton, which is not easy to get to. And if we were lucky, we might get to schedule forty to sixty percent of our team to attend these product presentations. The presenters, we were talking about fifteen to twenty sessions to be able to get through that many people because we could you know, four, five, six people maybe could be off the phones at one given time. And then, you know, cross your fingers that when the day is actually here that things end up okay and we so that we don’t have to cancel these sessions because people have come from across the country, to come and make these presentations. We were always, big on training and employee development. So we did use the shrinkage and spent the payroll on the training. So that really wasn’t necessarily, the fact that we weren’t doing the training, but those hours would add up quite quickly in terms of the payroll cost. And as most of you know that payroll in a contact center is the biggest expense. So this really allowed us to take this time, as Larry mentioned, where people are idle waiting for a call and finding a way to use it productively. And as we launched the solution, it was, you know, the agents welcome the opportunity to get some diversity in their work day to be able to, to do other things than taking phone calls. And so I’ll give you some examples because over the years, we’ve been extremely creative as to what type of activities we deploy to our agents. And now when anyone within the contact center has something that they wanna provide communication the way that things are going out, which means that there’s no longer hoping that someone’s gonna read the email that went out that was important or telling our employees that they need to go to SharePoint because something’s been updated. So obviously, we’ve done training, so e learning, compliance training, certification training when we’re adding skills for our agents. So that’s an obvious one that there’s no better way to do that than via Intradiem. Depending what we’re sending out, as Larry mentioned, there’s so much flexibility with the solution, in terms of what we can do, and it can be individual by type of information that we’re sending out. So if someone’s completing our employee engagement survey, well, we would prefer that they would not get interrupted while they’re giving us that feedback. So we would set a rule that would not allow any interruptions. If we’re sending, content that’s really kinda nice to have, we may decide that if now our there’s guests that are waiting in in the queue, then the agents will be interrupted to return to taking phone calls, but that activity will get requeued at the next opportunity. And when we’re talking about a survey such as the employee engagement survey or any other kinds of surveys we want to conduct, the beauty of the solution is a hundred percent of the colleagues are getting to participate in these surveys because they’re given the dedicated time to be able to complete them. So when you get the results and you know everybody had an opportunity to do it, it’s very powerful. Something that we’ve done since day one is using videos, because what we send through InterDEM doesn’t have to just be interactive elearning or reading documentation. We, in seven years ago, we would use our iPhone and go ahead and record maybe a little update message, and send it to the agents. Now we’re we’re a little bit more sophisticated. We’re using Teams or Zoom call, and so I start a session. I record myself. I can might be able to share screens and demo some information, and then we can deploy that as a video to our agents. We’ve really kept things simple where we’re not looking to be getting into video editing. If I’m providing, maybe a workforce planning update to our agents, and I kinda trip over a couple of words, We just move on and we send it out anyway because the the way we’re looking at it is if I was standing live in a meeting room or, like, today on a call, I don’t I can correct myself, but I just I can’t kinda, like, okay. Well, let’s delete that and I’ll rerecord it. So we’re just really trying to make it more, authentic and genuine. And all of our leaders have very much embraced this. Initially, people were like, oh, I don’t wanna know if I wanna be on camera. And then but I think with after COVID, everybody’s moved on from that hesitation. And our employees absolutely love getting updates whether it’s from our VP, From their own team leader now, we have our own employees that are part of, various committees. So it could be, we have a wellness task force, our health and safety committee. We do a lot of United Way, initiatives to raise funds for that organization. So the employees that are part of these committees, they’re doing videos to talk to the rest of their peers, and everybody’s very much embrace it. Our agents get to go to our hotels to learn about the product that they sell. So they’re bringing back, video of what they’ve learned at the hotel, some shots of, you know, So it’s just been a wonderful way to be able to, to do that. So it’s just been a wonderful way to be able to, to do that. Outside of training, we do, things like providing a surprise break on the month of your anniversary with the company. So if your anniversary is in June, at some point this month, you get a little pop up to say, go and enjoy an extra break on us. We’ve had the ability to individualize the training that we send out. So it could be something that’s geared for someone who’s only been with us for the last few months. It could be more advanced training. It could be refresher. It could be a one on one follow-up on somebody’s quality assessment that there’s a topic that maybe they need to review. So everything we sent out doesn’t have to be an all or nothing. We can determine who the right audience is and target only the people that need to get the the information. We send out, company updates, communication meeting minutes. And so, really, the possibilities are truly endless. I’ve got some statistics there, considering that we’re not a huge operation. So there were over forty six thousand dynamic sessions delivered, in twenty twenty three, and we’re kinda trending in the same path so far this year. When an agent gets something delivered to their desktop, we’re achieving a ninety nine percent accept rate. And then when you look at all the sessions we’ve delivered in twenty twenty three, it really averages about four hours of content per consultant per month, but those are all hours that people would be sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. Yeah. Those those are great stats. I mean, imagine being able to take a little over two percent off your shrinkage requirements. Ninety nine percent accept rate. That I mean, that’s that’s amazing. So, you know, as as Luis talked about, a pop up comes to the agent, but, ultimately, they have to hit start now to do it. So, technically, they don’t have to accept that. Talk to me a little bit about how you you achieve that. We’ve had a lot of success with that, Larry, and I think I I’ll go back to from day one when we introduced Intra Diem and we worked, with our internal team, and with your team at and trying to generate some excitement with our employees that this was really all about helping them be successful. And if our agents are successful and they’re engaged and they’re happy, we know that translates to our guest experience. We we get a lot of comments from our guests about the experience that they’re having, in dealing with our agents and that it stands out from other hotel companies. And so we we never talked about Intradiem activities as something that was optional. So it was it’s part of your workday. It’ll give you diversity in your workday. And so we just wanted to make sure that people didn’t feel like it was, oh, I have to do another training session. I have to read another document. And I think by having this variety of interactive training, videos, activities that they can complete. Some of it is actually from our wellness team are, like, a breathing exercises or kind of a little mental break where they can watch a little video of things happening in nature. And it’s been really, just so positive. But we’ve always I think it’s in the positioning, which never made it feel like it was, you know, oh, more work I have to do. That’s kind of the attitude that we took around it. And, obviously, the numbers showed the success because if that didn’t work, then we wouldn’t be seeing those kinds of great results. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, and we we we noted as trainable communication here, but it’s really off on engagement. Right? Yes. You know, and as you talk about, you know, going into COVID, having these videos. Right? You don’t have that lifeline to walk down the the hall to, you know, talk to your supervisor about something. I’m sure these videos and these other creative things, these wellness breaks really go a long way. I often get asked, you know, well, if you’re eating up idle time to deliver training and other things, don’t the agents feel burned out? And the reality is and and I love your guys’ point of view. The reality is it’s allowing them to do other creative things Above and beyond that, that verse sitting there twiddling their thumbs is that kind of what you guys hear too? Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the feedback that they give us is kinda you’re changing your attention to to something else. So that that makes a big difference. And, you know, you mentioned, the pandemic and I can you know, when we launched IntraDiem, we had made a decision that we would never deliver activities if we had callers waiting in queue. Our priority was our customers, and we felt that we could find enough idle time to be able to send the content. Well, there was a few things that happened when, the pandemic started, and then basically the phones, stopped ringing. And then when we started to bring things back, some of our call volume as different parts of North America kind of reopens. So we had hotels that were some hotels were opened with minimal availability and then some hotels were completely closed. But as hotels started to reopen, in regions that were more resort type settings that it was safe for people to be able to travel and feel they had the space, all of our all of a sudden, the phones went crazy faster than we could bring people back to work and that we could continue to recruit. And there was no idle time. And so we were concerned about agent burnout. So one of the first things we did is we gave everybody an extra break every day because we felt that the customers were actually being tolerant because at one point, it was please be patient. The whole world is short staffed. So customers knew when they called somewhere that maybe waits were longer than we would have seen pre pandemic. So that helped us, you know, take an agent off the phones to for their wellness to have an extra break. Even if customers were gonna have to wait a little longer, But we couldn’t send critical communication related to the continually changing policies around COVID-nineteen and what our hotels were doing and what the health restrictions were. And so we changed our rules and we actually delivered content, even though there were calls in queue. And we had said we would never do that, but the beauty of the solution is it worked at the time that made sense. That’s what we did, and we were able to adapt. So it’s just really so fluid in terms of what you can do based on what’s happening, in your organization and what’s gonna make sense at the time. Hey, Louise. Yeah. Is there a question? It looks like Andy’s, audio might have went out. There is a question from miss Shannon Scott over at Cigna. Can you go into more detail about how you’ve achieved such a high acceptance rate, specifically about the agent experience and behavior. We have chronic ignorers who disregard anything and everything interview attempts to offer. Yeah, and we, I mean, we’ve had a few people sometimes, so let’s say we’re sending a compliance training. Well, that’s not optional. Everybody has to do it. So we make sure. And if we have, you know, been completed by ninety seven people, we go and figure out who the three percent are that didn’t complete it. Occasionally, we found that, oh, those employees aren’t logging into the Intrademe solution. So that’d be the first follow-up. But we really collaborate with their team leaders and really talk about all the positives around the solution, and it’s really an expectation. So you don’t have a choice really, to say I don’t wanna play, but, you know, I’ll talk about it a little bit later, in this presentation about, feedback that we’ve received from our agents. But, we’re not getting pushback in terms of any negativity about, I don’t wanna be doing this, and it’s just really kinda how we’ve been able to positively spin that from day one. I think my client is back. Are we are we better now? Yeah. We can hear you, Andy. Okay. Thanks. Thanks for grabbing that, Larry. Yeah. And the other thing, Luis, that that really stands out to me about your adoption is something you said a couple minutes ago is It’s just part of our our contact center. Right? It’s introduced from day one when they are hired. And it’s just it’s not an option. It’s just how we do things. Absolutely. I do you want Gerard to maybe talk about what we do in the classroom in terms of I think that’d be great. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly. One of the, one of the challenges we had, with InterDiem, was, as Larry’s slide showed earlier, it sits between your WFM and your PBX. So when they are in training, they don’t really connect to a phone. So that half, of the puzzle was missing. So because we couldn’t know if they were on a phone or not, we couldn’t really deliver dynamic, sessions to them. So one of the things that we, did is, because the product is very flexible, we created a brand new permission profile for new hires. And this permission profile allows them to actually self serve. So they could go into their Intune console and pick any training that’s in there, at will. So we queue all the, compliances in there before they are even hired or any in class. And then when it’s appropriate, the trainer will say, okay, let’s go into IntuDium and let’s do our PCI compliancy today. So that’s a win win because, one, they get some of the training that that is required done, and they get to learn about the application and how to use it, while they’re in training even though they’re not on the phone yet. Yep. Yeah. That that’s pretty powerful, and that that’s great insight to anybody that’s currently leveraging that, and how to really increase adoption on that. Alright. So the next one that we’re gonna talk about is reminders of breaks lunches off phone meetings. Now just to level set what this really means is, I often ask how often do your agents go to things like lunch and break exactly at the right time. And I’m sure you’ll agree that’s few and far between. Right? That’s kind of a running joke. And so the reality is you got one of two options in that scenario. Either you can hire a small army to do nonstop exception processing of when they actually went. Or you can make it into your adherence goals, a k a uncontrollable adherence. But the agent perception when they get negatively dinged for something like that is not good. So tomorrow, if I have a break starting in five minutes and I just finished the call, I might hang out and after call work a little longer to ensure I go to break exactly at the right time. The good news is with the inter dm, having the insights into agent phone state and understanding what’s going on, they can now send in a pop up saying, hey, you’re idle three minutes before your lunch break. Go ahead and go early. And we automatically move that segment to the time that they went. Or if they are stuck on a long call, we can say thank you for putting the customer first. Rest assured once you’re done with this interaction, we’re going to shift the segment to reflect the actual time that you’re there. A k, removing uncontrollable adherence out of the equation. Huge agent, benefit from from that perspective. Louise, I’ll turn it over to you about your experience. Yeah, Yeah, actually, I’m gonna get Gerard’s gonna take us through, what he’s done with that and our success that we’ve had. So, just to further on what Larry was saying, each of these messages are also customizable. So, for example, if it’s your break that’s coming up, we’re going to send a message with that, that specific that says, enjoy your fifteen minute break. So we’re changing your phone to the aux break code, so they don’t really have a choice. If they’re on a call at the five minute mark before the this, we’ll actually queue it up, and they will, change your phone when they’re done their call. So there’s really no excuse now for an agent to not be where they should be at the time they should be there. That’s also helped us a lot, with people showing up at meetings late and so are you holding a meeting back for one or two individuals? Or, so it’s it’s definitely made things, much more on time. So for every different segment you have in your WFM, you can have a customized, notification, and customized off state you wanna put the phone in. We’ve obviously grouped some of them together, like, any, for committee meetings, for example, we’ve grouped all those together, and in one rule, but you can make them very customized for each segment you have in WFM. So that’s definitely been good for our agents. For the few times, where we may lose our our interview, agents will tell us, I missed my break. So and in normal times, they don’t. So it’s definitely a a proof that it works. Yeah. You know, and and the the power of that. Right? I I’ve recently talked to one of our large financial customers that has thirty thousand plus agents, and they said there’s tens of one thousand exceptions being automated a day that they would have had dedicated resources, simply coding all day. If if they didn’t have this. So, pretty powerful. All right. So the next one we’re gonna, move to is handle time assistance. So, again, having the pulse on the agent phone state, being able to set thresholds such as excessive after call work time, hold time, etcetera, prior to enter DM. What what contact centers typically have our or supervisors monitoring, real time screens. And when an alert would happen, first, they’d have to be looking at it, But second, then they’d react to it. And so it really was outlier management. Now, with Intradium and now can proactively be reach out that allows you to see a net benefit of reduction in in different areas of panel time. I’ll hand it back over to you guys to talk about this in your experience. Okay. This was probably our most, useful, use case that we’ve implemented since day one. This use case, what we’ve done is we’ve created a two tier, use case where at the hundred and twenty second threshold, the agent receives a notification automatically that says you’ve been in after call work for an extended period of time. And in most instances, they will actually it actually tells them if you’re done doing your after call work, please resume taking phone calls. In most instances, that’s what would happen. And the second tier to that is at the one hundred and eighty second, threshold, it actually sends a notification to their supervisor based on their profile and who they report to. So, the day that we implemented this, use case, our average, after call work dropped eleven seconds on average per agent. So that’s a very, very significant cost, on eleven seconds per average. The one thing that I that I’d like to say about this is, and to go back to what you were talking about. Intradium never sleeps, and it doesn’t have to look at a monitor. It knows if you’re in that threshold or not. And the, the other thing about accept accept the rate that, is so high, similar to that, we’ve never advertised what our threshold was. We’ve never gone out and told agents, you know, our threshold is a hundred and twenty seconds, because then they’ll sit some of them would sit there and wait the the hundred nineteen seconds. Sure. That’s also allowed us to actually lower that number over the past few years. So now we’re down to a hundred and ten seconds. And when we lowered the number, we did it twice. There’s not a single individual that’s come back and said, well, like, there’s less time now. So they didn’t even notice that we had lowered it. So it just allowed us to make things a little tighter, without them feeling that it was tighter. So the, Sorry. Go ahead. No. I think that was it about that that. So so Sorry. I I didn’t have another example. Yeah. Go for it. You just came back to me. The interesting thing is that we actually have some agents that have gone to their team leader and have asked if they could have a lower threshold. So we’ve have some we have some agents currently that the thresholds at the thirty second month. So they will get a notification at thirty second, and that’s because most of our consultants want to do well. So, and we present this tool as an assistant that can actually help them do their job well. So it’s it’s why they’re wanting it. And I think I think that’s just as powerful. If not more powerful to really have agent engagement in something like this that we’re gonna get to here in just a couple of minutes to dive a little deeper in. But, yeah, wow. Eleven seconds, right? Out of the gate, and sustained. And the other thing to really note on this is, this is truly looking at outlier management. It’s not supposed to create noise. So, if your average thirty seconds, we’re probably not gonna suggest a, alert at thirty seconds. But, as Gerard said, maybe it’s a hundred and twenty seconds. I’m really looking at my bottom quartile to get them up to speed to really improve everything. And the agents that had a very good phone practice, would rarely get a notification. And, at at times, they would forget themselves on after call work and would appreciate the notification because they’re proud of their numbers. Yeah. That’s great. Alright, Lou, Gerard. I think you’re gonna take us through one more, end of shift early logout. Really, what this is doing again, looking at the the skill and and queue, volatility, Seeing that there’s availability, maybe five ten minutes and before end of shift, and instead of taking a chance of a call coming through, that’s gonna lead to, incidental overtime, being able to proactively get in front of that and let people off a couple minutes early. Jordan, I’ll hand it back to you. Exactly. Like you said, so for our consultants, we, look any point five minutes prior to the end of their shift. If they are in a idle, state, we will actually the interview will actually log them out of their phone and send them a note that says, thank you for your work today. Enjoy the rest of your day. And, although it’s very difficult to put an ROI on this use case because we can’t really say if the agent would have got a call that would have put them in an overtime, position. It’s we know it has value. And and we’ve heard it from our agents that this is the, probably the most appreciated, rules that we have within Intradium. In twenty twenty three, we logged out over nine thousand agents at the end of their ship. And they are they’re now so used to, the fact that we can do almost anything. One of the feedback we’ve got, I think it was last year, was, well, if I cleared the wait list at the end of my shift, that segment is not my schedule, and I’m not getting the notification five minutes before my wait list. Well, we were able to, very quickly modify the rules so that it would actually do it at the beginning of the wait list versus the end of their ship. So it speaks again to the flexibility to adapt to, some of the feedback we were hearing from our agents. So, it it really solves that issue. It definitely, easily the the the rule that the agents, enjoy the most. Excellent. Now before we move to the next slide, Luis, just a question for you. We I see four hours per agent per month of training, eleven seconds handle time reduction, nine thousand instances of end of shift. Talk to me a little bit about what your investment return, is year over year on this. Well, it’s it’s very impressive. It’s, three times, what we’re paying for the solution annually. And this is something we’ve seen consistently since the first year. And those are really the hard payroll costs. So the ones that we can count, so the ACW, the hours that people are on the phones that we’re being productive. So we can’t even it would be bigger than that if we’re looking at things that we can’t quite quantify, just like what Gerard said, like, the early logout that we know there’s a financial benefit to it. But then the big piece too outside of the ROI financially is the positive impact that this is having on our colleague engagement. And maybe we can segue into, so we do an annual survey with the agents, how they feel about Intra Diem and anything we can be doing better. So I can share the results of our last survey, which continues to be, very positive. Let’s go to the next slide. So, as I mentioned earlier, we get a hundred participate, a hundred percent participation when we’re doing things, in Intra Dim. The core question asked agents how they felt that the Intra Dim solution is helping them, do a better job overall. So we had ninety eight out of ninety nine agents, say yes to that question. We talk about the ACW assistant could potentially be perceived as big brother. We’ve positioned it as an assistant Eighty seven percent agree that this is helpful to them. So that’s quite significant to see that type of a number on something that we’re doing from a productivity perspective, to keep people on task. Ninety five percent enjoy the reminders. So that’s about your meetings, your breaks, your lunches. And, you know, what’s funny about that, you know, why would somebody not enjoy it? Somebody put a comment, well, I don’t need a reminder because I know when my breaks are. So I guess it’s just somebody who is organized. So it was kind of it’s kind of fun to see, you know, the the context of how they respond because they could add comments to these, responses. Ninety seven percent enjoy, the end of shift logout. We had in the three percent, somebody put a comment. I actually never get these reminders. So we thought, oh, maybe there’s something with their profile. So we did a little digging, and we came we figured out that the person because we had said that it you could receive that within the last five minutes of your shift. Somebody just kinda took that as a go ahead to log out five minutes before the end of your shift. So, of course, they never saw the notifications because they weren’t even logged in. And it was funny because if we are busy, then you would not get the notification. That’s the intention of the real time aspect of this. So that you would stay on for the full duration of the end of your shift. But, anyway, so it was kinda funny when we saw that. And then interestingly enough, interestingly enough, because a lot of people will complete surveys, but they don’t spend a lot of time on any open ended questions unless they really have a problem. Fifty five percent of these ninety nine people that did this survey actually provided suggestions, ideas, on what kind of other content we could send through IntraDiem, some other possible uses. And because we meet monthly with our Intradium success manager, we can discuss innovative things that, you know, we hadn’t thought of that maybe we can implement. And, you know, I don’t think there’s been anything to date in the last seven years that we’ve come up with that we’ve not been able to do an interdiem. So if we say, oh, I wonder if we could figure out a way to do this. And it doesn’t have to be with just delivering content, but all these other innovative types of use cases that we’ve done. And then there was tons and tons of open ended comments about what I like the best about IntraDiem. So I really only put a very small sample, but it just you get a a sense of truly of how agents feel about the solution, which was really nice for us to, to be able to validate the success that we’re seeing with the tool. Yeah. You know, I I think the real power of Intradium is how they partner with their customers, whether it’s in the core hotels with a hundred and fifty agents, or it’s a large financial bank with tens of thousands of agents. Really the key here is the change management and really making sure that agents, the agent experience is the number one goal. You know, like, Louis said, you know, ACW alerts could really come off as big brother. But if you position it really as an assistant and make sure that the agents understand what’s in it for them. It goes a long way, and it allows you to get the value, the hard dollar value that Luis and Dror talked about by making sure that you you’ve, invested into the agents first and foremost. The other thing that I I would say before we go to q and a is, you know, all these different things that Gerard and Luis, talked about. These are things that they bring back to enter diem, and it becomes things that go on our roadmap. Our customers are our best inventor. And as we look at out in the future of what automation looks like at Intradium, the nonstop, feedback from our customers really build that road map. Alright. I think it’s time for q and a. So if you guys out there have any questions about anything you saw today, feel free to put them into the chat now. And then, Andy, let us know if if any questions come through. K. Nothing so far. I know one question that I often get is, oh, there’s one. There’s one that comes through. What is the normal time to implement? So I will take that first, and then Louis draw feel free to chat me. I know it’s been seven years, so I don’t recall, but, typically, implementation of something like this to do the integrations to an, get all the training and change management done is gonna run about ninety to one hundred and twenty days. It really is dependent on it priority internally inside your your contact center. We have done it as fast as forty seven days, and it could take a lot longer depending on, again, the the IT priority. The actual work of implementing, I would say eighty five percent of that is done by Intra Diem. The other fifteen percent from an IT perspective inside your contact center is really opening firewalls and giving you access to and WFM. Yeah. I know. Our our implementation was very much in line with what the timelines recommended by Intradiem that gave us, plenty of time to be able to get everything set up and rolled out. And, you know, once it’s once it’s live, it works like magic. Yep. Alright. Looks like, there’s a question from Keisha. When where the system automatically makes changes in WFM, what type of adherence results does your do your staff have? Do you have goals around adherence still? No. We don’t have goals around adherence because we would rather we would manage the odd outlier. But generally speaking, we’ve never really had a significant challenge. So it just, you know, it was one more. There’s so many metrics around how agents are are measured and held accountable. So that wasn’t really one that for us, that was focused on, but it definitely it’s helping from, you know, people that are forgetting that it’s break time. And then next thing you know, they’ve taken three more calls. So the reminders have made a big difference in terms of kinda keeping people on task. And and, Keisha, for our customers that do, have adherence goals, it’s typically two to four percent easily out of the gate similar to what Gerard said with the ACW, the immediate, changes are seen, like, instantaneously. I see there was a question about how quickly it writes back to Alvarria. That’s, pretty instant. Really? Yep. Yep. And then there was a question, that I know Andy answered in the chat, but I’ll bring it to light. The question was around, what does the alert look like for the agent? It sounds like it pops up prominently, so it’s very visible. So yes. And and feel free, Luis and Gerard, to to chime in. It is a pop up. There’s a desktop executable, loaded to each either virtual machine or or actual physical machine, depending on your environment. And when it an action is fired, it’ll come to the forefront of an agent’s screen, but it does not take focus away from what they’re doing. And it contains pretty much three different, section. One section contains your schedules and all of the exceptions they have for that say. It contains a message, so you can queue up messages also, instant messages in there. So if any were sent, then it would be in there. And the third component would be any dynamic task or delivered would be in that tab. Excellent. Just going through here. What are some other creative ways customers are using automation to improve agent engagement. So I I think I think, Luis and Gerard, you really touched on some other creative ways like the videos, the wellness breaks and whatnot that seems to be becoming a standard with our customer base. That again, it goes back to investing in your agents, you know, realizing burnout is a real thing and giving them these breathers, these wellness breaks, these videos to interact if they’re work at home. Absolutely. Yeah. Ensuring that there’s variety and the content that we’re sending so that it’s not always work per se, ensuring that there’s some recognition that’s sent through there, ensuring that the the variety really helps, keeping them engaged because they’re gonna want to receive it, for that fact. Yep. Alright. Question for you guys. How did you overcome the big brother feeling for agents? Go ahead, Jordan. We’ve, from day one, we’ve positioned it as, somebody that could help them achieve higher goals in their job. So it’s in it’s no different than a team leader sitting down and with them in a meeting saying your after call work is too high. You need to reduce this. The biggest difference is we’re doing it real time versus after the fact a month later. It’s much harder for a consultant to relate to any, an instance if it’s a month later. First, if we do it right there, then we’re helping them on the spot. And that can impact, during incentives. It can impact, the the quality of their work. So it wasn’t that difficult, for us to do. We always have a few outliers, and we address those with their team leaders. Excellent. Alright. I think we’ve got about five minutes left. I haven’t seen any other questions come through. Really appreciate, the time today with, oh, sorry. One question came through real quick. How do the supervisors enjoy the tool? It makes it easier for them to communicate, because they they come there’s, I would say, Gerard, like, a good eighty percent of the content, I think, is coming from that supervisory group. Some of it’s coming from HR. Like, it’s coming from different like, we’re we deploy the activities, but we’re not necessarily the creators unless I’m sending specific content related to workforce planning initiatives. But, I think that and then it’s we didn’t talk about it’s the speed at which stuff gets communicated and delivered. Right? So we’ll send something to everybody and within forty eight hours, we probably have eighty percent unless they were off, like, eighty percent of the employees receive the information. So, so team leaders love it. Yeah. Some some supervisors, for example, we have, some teams that are not on InterDiem yet. We’re we are going there. When we’re sending out a compliance c via InterDiem, to piggyback on what Luis is saying, a week and a week, they’re done. Versus teams that are not on, the supervisor could be chasing that per month. So, the supervisors, definitely enjoy that aspect of it. Depending on how many notification we do to the agent supervisor, it can certainly significant, an increase in e in notifications or emails to them. But if they’re addressing the issue, that should decline. Yeah. And Gerard, you said something earlier about interdiums never sleeping. And I think that really. Delivers to how fast things are getting out. Right? So if you find if there’s a pocket of idle time right now. The reality is can’t react fast enough to fill it with something, whereas you’ve already got it queued up just waiting for that to happen and then enter the fill. And so, yeah, the the speed at which things get done drastically increases. And we’ve been able to push things out that are an hour and a half long, with little to no impact on our, guest experience. Yeah. That that’s that’s the power of it. Alright. Well, again, thank you so much. This has been great. Really appreciate you guys sharing your story, for the audience. If there’s any other questions, whatnot you see here, you got the QR codes for Louise and myself on LinkedIn Feel free to reach out. We’d love to chat with you. And again, thanks for attending. Vicky? Thanks, guys, so much. This has been great and learned a whole lot about how, Aqor uses this product and uses it to make things better in their center. So, I know Louise has been a big proponent for many, many years. So, we’re we’re excited to share this with everybody else. So, thanks to everybody. We’ll we do have a recording, and we will send this out so you can share it with anyone else in your organization that might have missed today, and we’ll send it out to anybody who wasn’t able to attend. But for now, I guess we will go ahead and close this webinar. Thanks again to Larry and Louise and Gerard. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.