Contact centers are at the frontlines of handling fraud – a growing threat that cost consumers $10 billion in 2023, up $1 billion from the previous year according to the FTC. As fraud attempts grow, contact centers at financial services firms are tasked with delivering fast, reliable service to protect customers and build trust, all while managing resources efficiently and cost effectively.
Having the right number of skilled agents is paramount to prevent long hold times, delays, and frustration — issues that only amplify the impact of fraud.
To deliver exceptional customer service, you need to master the art of workforce planning – predicting how many calls you’ll receive and ensuring you have the right people available to help while avoiding under- or overstaffing.
However, this task becomes increasingly complex when you operate omnichannel contact centers around the world, with hundreds of agents working around the clock to answer phones, chat, emails, text (SMS), and social media. Coordinating people, costs, and strategy across multiple horizons is inherently difficult.
Today, workforce planning strategy at most financial services firms is reactive, done in silos, and tackled in bits and pieces by various stakeholders. It mostly relies on cumbersome spreadsheets that provide a fragmented, stale, and static view of the business, and offer limited forecasting capabilities across timeframes, from intra-day to short-term and long-term. Additionally, if a team member is out sick or unavailable, critical spreadsheets and data may be inaccessible, causing delays in decision-making.
It’s time to break free from these constraints and modernize planning for your contact center operations.
Using an integrated workforce planning approach, you can forecast demand and workload with unparalleled accuracy, considering historical data, seasonality, and external factors like market trends and major events (e.g., holiday shopping, the Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup, or Taylor Swift concerts), which may trigger fraud spikes.
By evolving your contact center planning from reactive to proactive, you can more accurately determine your staffing levels to match anticipated demand and ensure customers receive support when they need it most.
With the right workforce planning solution, you can:
In its quest for operational excellence, a large retail bank with nearly 20 million customers engaged with Anaplan to optimize its call center fraud operations, which received hundreds of thousands of calls each month and supported over 30 customer journeys across multiple internal and external telephony lines. The bank’s mission was clear: deliver the right support at the right moment to customers in distress.
Previously bogged down by fragmented spreadsheets, stale data, isolated analysis, and siloed decision-making, the bank grappled with redundant resources and annual budget overruns. Mismatches in staffing, a result of oversimplified demand modeling, not only drove up costs due to over- and understaffing but also diminished the customer experience.
Using the Anaplan scenario planning and analysis platform, the retail bank was able to achieve the following benefits:
By leveraging a transformative workforce planning solution like Anaplan, you can forecast demand with precision and align your workforce capacity and skills with your top-line business goals to drive growth and profitability while delivering a better customer experience.
To learn more about how to get started elevating your workforce planning strategy, go to https://www.anaplan.com/solutions/strategic-workforce-blueprinting/.
Anaplan is the only scenario planning and analysis platform designed to optimize decision-making in today’s complex business environment. Since 2006, we’ve delivered exceptional customer value and driven innovation that redefines what’s possible. Our AI-infused platform, with over a million models deployed, is embedded with industry expertise and built-in best practices empowering you with actionable insights to be the next — the next to make the right decisions, right now. For more information about Anaplan, please visit www.anaplan.com.
