Supporting Leeds Building Society with Colleague Engagement

Leeds Building Society was established in 1875 to help people save money and to buy their own home. Today, almost 150 years later, this remains the organisation’s core purpose. Leeds Building Society is a purpose-led organisation that develops and innovates its product range and services to help its 945,300 members through all stages of their lives. The organisation places a significant emphasis on creating a great working environment, with an approach to flexible working that promotes a healthy balance between professional and personal ambitions, and an aim to enhance colleague wellbeing, while also supporting the needs of its members. With a busy contact centre managing on average one million interactions every year, a growing workforce, and a commitment to maintaining a positive customer experience, the team identified a need to implement a robust system to manage team rotas, while supporting colleagues in the best possible way.

With heavily manual processes in place, it was clear that a more automated approach was required for the management of its then 170 contact centre colleagues. The existing processes were not sustainable or efficient, and therefore the team sought help from Business Systems.

Jonathan Martin, Operational & Planning Management Lead, confirms, “The project originated as we were looking to enhance our capabilities within our operational division. It was clear that there was a gap for a Workforce Management (WFM) tool, as our existing processes were heavily manual on systems that had been built in-house, and this had the potential to create a number of key person risks.”

It was vital for Leeds Building Society to implement a fit-for-purpose WFM solution that would improve engagement with its contact centre agents by enabling a more proactive approach, while delivering improved adherence. In doing so, the aim was to move away from manual and inefficient spreadsheets and instead incorporate more automation, which would provide a better fit to customer demand, greater modelling capability, while empowering both colleagues and team leaders.
Business Systems was approached to provide the answer. Explains Erweena Humpherson, Operational Optimisation Manager (Planning), “This is my second time working with Business Systems and so I have a long working relationship with the team. I’ve been through implementations with them before and trust their expertise and recommendations – Business Systems is a safe pair of hands.”

Having undertaken a thorough market assessment, Business Systems proposed Calabrio ONE as the solution to meet Leeds Building Society’s needs, goals and team culture.
Jonathan Martin, confirms, “Business Systems took the time to understand what we needed to achieve as a mutual. Although we wanted a WFM solution for my team – the planning function – we wanted something that would work well for colleagues, engage with them, and fit within our purpose. As a result, Business Systems confirmed that Calabrio ONE was the solution to take forward.”

Steven Driver, Forecasting and Planning Manager, added, “Prior to our partnership with Business Systems and Calabrio, the planning department was a little stuck in the past using static Excel spreadsheets to do scheduling, which was not ideal. It was a very one-dimensional relationship with operations in terms of what data we could share and how quickly we could change schedules to respond to customer demands.”

With workforce optimisation at the core, Calabrio ONE provides complete transparency of the employee and customer experience from a single interface. The dashboard provides real-time visibility of staffing to enable the planning team to make adjustments to match customer demand, and also includes predictive forecasting, which uses historic data to forecast call volumes to improve colleague scheduling.

While from the agent’s perspective, the solution offers several key benefits, including self-service functionality, allowing colleagues to manage their time more effectively. This includes the Calabrio ‘My Time’ app, which gives colleagues the freedom and control to manage their working schedules at anytime, and from any location. Agents can easily build their own schedules, request time for lunches and breaks, and even trade shifts.

Simple parameters ensure Leeds Building Society can maintain staffing-level requirements at all times, without manual calculations or delay.
To provide additional value, Business Systems arranged a reference site visit for the team at Leeds Building Society to see Calabrio ONE in action with a similar contact centre environment.

The implementation and training process began amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which presented some initial challenges, as Steven Driver explains, “I was fairly involved in the process from the start and given that we were in the early stages of lockdown, the deployment was managed remotely. Subsequent training was transitioned to remote learning too, rather than in a classroom. Business Systems did a really good job of rolling out the training – taking many novices of WFM to being really competent users.”

Tailored workshops were delivered to Leeds Building Society, with a step-by-step approach that involved building the solution alongside the team. This collaborative method ensured that the team was well-prepared for the go-live phase, with regular check-ins and post go-live health checks to ensure optimal use of the system in order to achieve the best return on investment.

Since implementing Calabrio ONE, Leeds Building Society has seen significant improvements. Now with over 310 colleagues, the system has expanded to support various departments, including the contact centre in Newcastle (125.8 FTE), service desk (29.5 FTE), mortgage services and collections (72.7 FTE), direct mortgages (39.9 FTE) and customer support function (45.5 FTE).

Adherence has improved to a steady 90%, efficiencies have been created, and colleagues enjoy the platform and the benefits it brings.
For example, the solution provides colleagues with the flexibility to book shifts, holidays, and overtime, which has both empowered and supported them, as Jonathan Martin noted, “Without the solution and help of Business Systems, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We’ve established a robust, fit-for-purpose solution for the future. We’ve integrated it into our culture and continue to embed and enhance it.

When talking to Selena Hughes, Contact Centre Team Leader, she has seen the positive impact the WFM solution has had on colleagues, “Previously, it wasn’t possible to keep track of what everyone was doing by memory and I had very little knowledge of my team’s performance. To find answers, I would have to look at four spreadsheets and it could take hours to pull out the team’s performance and adherence data. Now, with Calabrio ONE, it’s all in front of you in real time – it’s so much easier.

Continues Selena: “From a mood perspective, the teams feel much happy that they get answers much quicker on their schedules; and not just from a work perspective, but life perspective. They can plan their lives better around the system, including using a mobile app, which is great for overall morale.”

On talking to one of Selena’s customer service representatives, Morgan East, he agrees with the positive impact Calabrio ONE has had on his time management abilities: “When managing my schedule, I used to have to wait for emails or look on Excel sheets, which I’m not good at. Now, I can instantly see when my time is approved or denied straight away. I know what I’m doing, where I need to be and when. The system is very user friendly and easy. It’s completely different.”

Business Systems specialises in providing mission critical Enterprise Communications Solutions to enable digital transformations for contact centres.

We provide Monitoring & Compliance and Workforce Engagement Management solutions along with the underlying Cloud Communications software and infrastructure needed to deliver them.

Our professional services team work closely with customers such as UK Power Networks, Zen Internet and Leeds Building Society.

We represent organisations such as Calabrio and NICE as well as developing our own technology.