I looked all over my old hard drive to see if I had told this story before for On Target but couldn’t find it. Please forgive me if you’ve heard it before!
Once upon a time, I was an analyst for a super-large credit card company, helping analyze collections and its operation. It was crazy interesting work, much different than I had feared walking into the job. Earlier in my career, I had built schedules for airport employees at an airline, and I was asked by my current boss if I could build more efficient schedules for their inbound and outbound collections agents. It was right up my alley.
I pulled in a brilliant summer intern, Jeff Finocchiaro, to help out. Fun fact: today Jeff’s a senior leader at a major insurance and financial company, and he writes entertaining posts about sports and statistics on LinkedIn. You should absolutely give him a follow — he’s a terrific guy. Tell him I say hey!
We developed some very elegant math to help us with placing our agents in more productive shifts, and when we took our first pass at optimizing schedules, it showed improved contact rates and overall efficiency north of 60 percent. A huge win.
(Side note: outbound scheduling is much cleaner and simpler than inbound — maybe I’ll write about that next time.)
Anyway, not being bashful about improvements, I ran up to the big boss’ office to show him the results. He was just as excited as I was. “Can you fly out and show the agents the new schedules?” Absolutely! I booked a flight to Orlando for the pilot rollout.
We were very careful to avoid moving agents too far from their existing schedules — just an hour or two of change at most. Now, those of you with more experience in this area are probably snickering into your Starbucks… but surprisingly, the rollout meetings weren’t bad.
I walked agents through the new schedules, explained how we’d boost efficiency, listened to their concerns, and promised to address what we could. Then I flew home feeling good.
Later that night, after I got home from Florida, my wife said my boss had called urgently (pre-cellphone days), so I rang her back. She said, “What in the world did you do? They’re all threatening to quit! We’re putting the project on indefinite hold!”
And just like that, the whole thing was shelved. I was lucky to keep my job.
Much later, I shared the ordeal with a friend, Hal Hawtof, who asked a killer question: “Did you tell the agents how much more money they’d make with those schedules?” I had not.
Our collectors earned substantial incentive pay for successful collections and payment plan enrollments. More contacts = more payments = higher earnings. But I’d failed to mention that part to them. Hmm.
I asked to return and try again — this time emphasizing their potential bonus bump — but the big boss responded: “You are never, ever, to enter Orlando or the State of Florida again.” That was that.
Hal came up with a brilliant idea, twenty-ish years ahead of its time: let agents pick their own schedules, armed with data about which time slots were most lucrative for them. Our big boss liked Hal’s idea and asked us to build a small system to help agents choose their schedules and a process for making everything go smoothly.
The process we came up with was solid. Every two weeks, we scheduled agents for just 10 of their 40 weekly hours (to cover inbound needs), then let them choose the remaining 30 however they wanted — with some minor constraints. Crucially, we showed them how much incentive pay they’d likely earn in each time slot. The best windows? Mornings, lunch, evenings, weekends — typically the least preferred times to work. It was clear to them which times would be a snooze and which hours would lead to more cash in their pockets.
I was reauthorized to enter Florida (with Hal as my escort), and we pitched the new process to skeptical agents. They tested it out.
The first round of schedules looked a lot like the old ones. But by round two? Agents radically optimized their shifts. Triple split shifts: morning, lunch, evening. Tougher than anything I’d dared suggest. And they loved it.
Our dialer rewarded them with record paychecks. And they were able to schedule around their kid’s school events or doctor’s visits. Flexibility and more cash. It was such a win for everyone.
What we learned was:
Agents want to do well; they just need the information and freedom to do so.
Ric Kosiba is a charter member of SWPP. Ric is a founder of Real Numbers, a contact center capacity planning and modeling company. Ric can be reached at ri*@*********rs.com or (410) 562-1217. Please know that he is *very* interested in learning about your business problems and challenges (and what you think of these articles). Want to improve that capacity plan? You can find Ric’s calendar and can schedule time with him at realnumbers.com. Follow Ric on LinkedIn! (www.linkedin.com/in/ric-kosiba/)
