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Canadian Tire, Ltd., Canada's largest employer, operates many call centers for its credit card operations, customer service and auto parts stores. In addition, Canadian Tire operates a nationwide, 24/7 in-bound call center for its own auto club members as well as for several auto manufacturers, like General Motors and Cadillac, whose customers periodically need emergency road service. Known as the Professional Dispatch Group or PDG Call Centre, this large 24/7 operation faced significant employee turnover and high personnel costs in the summer of 2000. At that time, Canadian Tire was bidding on new contracts for the PDG Call Centre that would have doubled or tripled its size. These contracts are awarded primarily on costs, so PDG needed to reduce its staffing costs—the primary determinant of operational efficiency in any call center. An initial assessment of Canadian Tire's PDG Call Centre, including both its Auto Club Membership and Emergency Road Services components, revealed the enormous complexity of this operation. Not only were its Customer Service Representatives and Dispatchers (known collectively as Advisors) providing 24/7 coverage, but their total service area also crossed six different time zones and two different language requirements—French and English. Moreover, call volumes fluctuated significantly according to weather conditions, which made both weekly and daily call-volume predictions difficult. In turn, weekly and daily staffing levels were hard to predict, since weather patterns can vary significantly from year to year, making historical-patterns data dubious. To handle these wide volume variations, Canadian Tire's staffing plan included permanent full-time and part-time employees as well as a contingency work force supplied by a third-party vendor. Root Causes of Cost Challenges Round-The-Clock Systems's Business Requirements Analysis Project revealed two major root causes of Canadian Tire's cost problems. The first root cause was the staffing design. Specifically, the FY 2000 staffing plan did not provide a sufficient number of full-time personnel to cover the call volume during base operating hours. This deficiency resulted in two costly practices: assigning more hours to part-time personnel than they desired, resulting in high turnover and employee dissatisfaction; and reliance on the costly services of contingency personnel. The second root cause was the scheduling software. Most critically, the scheduling assumptions built into the software were not empirically derived, and not sufficiently linked to strategic business needs. From experience, Round-The-Clock Systems has found that this lack of business-driven scheduling parameters is a common deficiency in the off-the-shelf and/or partially-customized work schedule software typically used in call centers or other types of 24/7 operations. The consequences of this deficiency are enormous, since poor scheduling assumptions result in both overstaffing and understaffing, the former producing high employee costs and the latter resulting in poor customer response times. To cure the problems of high employee costs and low employee morale at Canadian Tire's PDG Call Centre, Round-The-Clock Systems initiated a two-month Strategic Staffing and Schedule Design Consultation. During this project, Round-The-Clock Systems created a Strategic Staffing Plan that re-aligned existing personnel around three core call center functions—Customer Service, Service Control and Operations Support. Additionally, telephone availability was increased, and 20 part-time employees were upgraded to full-time positions. Simultaneously, empirically-tested Scheduling Assumptions were deployed, including a change in the Coverage Rule for software-generated schedules that provided better control over intra-day staffing requirements. Strategic Scheduling Parameters were established by the PDG Management Team, and correlated changes were made in both the Master File for scheduling full-time staff and the Shift Templates used to auto-assign schedules for part-time employees. These schedule design changes resulted in better weekend work patterns for full-time employees together with a reduction in split workweeks for part-time employees, both of which were received favorably by Canadian Tire employees. Round-The-Clock Systems has predicted that its partnership with Canadian Tire, Ltd. would result in a CN$786,500 annual savings in labor costs, which represented a 1,356% return on investment for the client. However, two years following implementation, the PDG Call Centre has experienced an annual savings of CN$2 million in staffing costs, and Canadian Tire has received a 3,448% return on its investment. Round-The-Clock Systems, through its combined Business Requirement Analysis Project and Strategic Staffing and Schedule Design Consultation, delivered on its promise to this client—and then some! ← back to case studies |