NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – Feb. 28, 2024 – The Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) has announced the five finalists for the 2024 Workforce Management Professional
of the Year Award, which recognizes a workforce management professional who has shown outstanding leadership in the industry. The finalists are Eric Bigelow of Qualfon, Brandon
Kelly of Options for All, Elias Saykali of TD Bank Group, My Tran of UC Davis Health, and Chris Trujillo of Memorial Hermann.

“These five workforce management professionals are truly representative of the ‘best of the best’ in our industry,” said Vicki Herrell, SWPP Executive Director. “They have all demonstrated great leadership and ability in the field, as well as shown measurable results for their companies. We are pleased to present them as finalists for this distinguished award.” The winner of the award will be announced at the SWPP Annual Conference, which is held in Nashville, Tennessee on March 4-6, 2024.

Eric Bigelow is Workforce & Systems Support Manager for Qualfon, a business process outsourcer with 10,000 agents in 25 locations operating 24×7. Monthly volume is eight million contacts including phone, chat, email, and back office. The workforce management team includes 200 people utilizing Verint WFM systems. Eric’s team includes four analysts supporting the 200 WFM team members.

Eric began his contact center career in frontline roles and moved to an insurance company in their WFM team as it expanded from one center to multiple sites and BPO relationships. He then joined Qualfon, where he led the WFM team and real-time analytics (RTA) team before becoming the internal product manager for Qualfon’s Verint solutions. Here are just a few of Eric’s accomplishments:

  • Implemented the Verint system with close to 100% utilization in 1 year.
  • Revamped and automated the process of adding agents during onboarding.
  • Built an internal reporting dashboard including real-time updates and more accurate client tracking and reporting.
  • Automated the updating of skills in employee profiles.
  • Rolled out strategic planning functionality and what-if scenarios.

Eric’s team rolled out Request Management and the Verint Mobile Work View application, converting a manual email-based process for shift changes and exceptions to an automated one. This saved time for employees, supervisors, and managers by handling schedule changes, callouts, no shows, and absenteeism. This improved employee satisfaction with increased scheduling flexibility. The WFM team saw 3000 tickets per month reduced by 55%. The no call/no show rate was reduced to 5% from 7-8% and a 1-2% reduction in attrition has resulted in a 33% reduction in the new hire classes.

The team is now working to deploy flextime to give employees options to better manage work-life balance. Previously, employees who couldn’t get a shift change request approved for an appointment would often call out for a full day. Now they can work their full weekly hours and still attend the appointment. This increases productivity and employee engagement, reduces absenteeism and no shows, and lessens the impact on service levels.

Brandan Kelly is Workforce Manager for Options for All, a health and human services company serving adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The center operates Monday-Friday from 7am-5pm and employs 350 agents in seven centers with some agents working from home. The center uses Zira for workforce management with integration to SetWorks as the CRM, and Paycom as the HRIS.

After completing six years in the US Navy, Brandan joined Options for All as a frontline agent. As he transitioned into the role of Workforce Manager, he recognized the need to enhance the scheduling efficiency and align WFM planning with dynamic client contact requirements. Utilizing an RFP process, Brandan selected a vendor who partnered with them to iterate through multiple rounds of development and testing that resulted in an AIpowered scheduling system utilizing advanced algorithms. The system automated the staff-client matching process, ensuring optimal workforce deployment and automated workflows for routing tasks such as emails and SMS. It also provides a real-time attendance tracking system to monitor and improve staff presence.

Brandan has had many accomplishments, including:

  • Increased client conversion rate by 20%.
  • Saved over 100 FTE hours per week or $324,000 annually with automation.
  • Increased attendance by 37%, enhancing service delivery resulting in annual savings of $553,236.
  • Implemented process improvements resulting in an annual savings of $4,068,792.
  • Saved a total of $4.8 million annually, representing 24% of the company’s annual revenue.

Brandon was distinguished as a keynote speaker at two pivotal industry symposiums, addressing a statewide assembly for the California Department of Developmental Services and a national audience at ANCOR, where he shaped conversation for ANCOR’s influence in the national’s capital on behalf of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In each forum, Brandan delivered a comprehensive talk on his pioneering development and deployment of a state-of-the-art scheduling system, a groundbreaking innovation in the realm of call center operations. His discourse detailed the journey from conceptualization to execution of this novel scheduling model, which has set a new benchmark for operational efficiency in the sector.

Elias Saykali is Senior Leader, WFM Command & Dispatch Centre for TD Bank Group. This financial services company employs 12,000 agents in 23 locations and remotely on a 24×7 basis. They handle five million monthly inbound and outbound voice, inbound chat, social, email and back office contacts. The technology used includes Cisco UCCE, Genesys Routing, NICE WFM and EEM, Genesys WFM, and Verint. The workforce management team employs 160 people.

According to the Senior Manager of Command & Dispatch, Elias possesses a rare combination of strategic thinking and hands-on problem-solving, making him an exceptional leader. His ability to envision and implement ground-breaking processes has been a driving force behind his team’s success. He is known for fostering a collaborative and motivated team environment where his leadership has become synonymous with success.

Elias has accomplished many amazing things during his tenure at TD Bank that produced great results for the organization, including:

  • Service level targets were met for the first time ever and sustained consistently for an unprecedented 13 months. This moved the organization from 5th to 1st for service level performance based on a benchmarking study of the “Big 5” banks.
  • Occupancy levels dropped only 1% while the service level increased 13 points.
  • Implementation of Voluntary time off resulted in a full year paid FTE hours reduction of 3% or $15MM (CAD).
  • A live dashboard was created that integrates multiple data sources, providing realtime insights in ACD, weather, live insurance claims, logins to the bank website, customer transactions, and real-time incidents. This offers a view of ongoing activities, enabling proactive decision-making and creating a rapid response centre mitigating against unexpected events.
  • Service level consistency across all intervals was a focus and reporting capabilities to produced heatmaps highlighting the opportunities overall and for each line of business.

Elias consistently secures the highest employee engagement survey results across the entire WFM department with a 98% employee engagement index score (median score 86%).

My Tran is Business System Analyst Supervisor II for UC Davis Health. The organization has one center but over 80% of the 300 agents work from home. Cisco Unified Contact Center and Calabrio One WFM are utilized. The WFM team has two additional members reporting to My. The agents handle 1.5 million inbound patient inquiries, make 15,000 outbound patient contacts, and 150,000 patient referrals per year.

My began his career as a phone agent and then supervisor. When WFM was introduced in his center at a previous job, he volunteered to spend time with the WFM team to better understand what WFM is and why it matters. He then joined another organization where he worked alongside the individual who had built eHealth’s WFM function from the ground up. When the opportunity to build the first-ever WFM function at UC Davis Medical Center presented itself, he jumped at the chance.

The UC Davis Medical Center relied on its front-desk receptionists to handle patient checkins and scheduling, which was not efficient and did not provide the superior customer experience they wanted. Launching a modern, WFM-fueled contact center took the service level from 35% in 60 seconds to 60% in 60 seconds with an abandonment rate of 1.74%, but My believed they could reach 80% in 30 seconds. However, that required a significant change in the processes and culture which required education and knowledge sharing with a team of tenured personnel.

The results of My’s initiatives included:

  • Average downtime – decreased from 15 minutes to 4.54 minutes
  • Abandonment rate – decreased from 20-24% to less than 1%
  • Maximum wait time in the queue – decreased from >1 hour to less than 14 minutes
  • Adherence – increased from 87% to almost 92%

My’s focus on continuing improvements and education has included creating training materials and classes, dashboards to enable agents to self-monitor, collaboration with the quality team, a SharePoint knowledge management system, dashboards for telephony, WFM and operations, and he is leading the definition, planning, and development of a contact center technology roadmap to cover the next five years.

Chris Trujillo is System Director of Workforce Manager for Memorial Hermann. This healthcare organization operates 10 centers 24×7 using Cisco and Calabrio WFM technology. The 500 agents handle 650,000 monthly contacts and the operation has a WFM team of six people.

Chris has over 20 years of WFM, capacity planning, and analytics experience in centers of all sizes. He has worked with a variety of systems and built/rebuilt WFM departments in multiple contact centers. He joined Memorial Herman two years ago, and the organization had no WFM processes or systems at the time. At the time he joined Memorial Hermann, the wait times in some departments were as high as 10+ minutes.

The Calabrio WFM system was implemented along with Core Reporting. Chris’s accomplishments include:

  • Created staffing models and SLA standards for each group based on the patterns and AHT.
  • Implemented standard Reporting Stacks in a Cadence Deliver model including historical, real time and future reporting.
  • Implemented capacity planning
  • Expanded WFM support to 12 departments.
  • Reduced abandons from 28% to <10%.
  • Reduced misrouted calls from 30% to <5%.
  • Increased answer rate to 90+% in all support departments.
  • Increased schedule adherence to 90%+.
  • Maximized agent occupancy to 88-92%.
  • Reduced attrition from 32% to 21%.
  • Created an optimized scheduling approach, implementing breaks, lunches, meetings, back office segments, along with implementing a process of PTO and off-phone segments.
  • Increased caller satisfaction by 18%.
  • Reduced agent waste by 10%.

According to Dale Sturgill, VP of Strategy, “Chris’s work has led to efficiency gains not seen in Memorial Hermann contact centers in all its history. As the company moves toward a more digital set up, Chris’s efforts have prepared for the transition while also taking care of patients.”

The SWPP Board of Advisors selected the five finalists from nominations submitted on the SWPP website. The Workforce Management Professional of the Year award is chosen from the five finalists by the Board of Advisors and will be announced at the 2024 SWPP Annual Conference.