The Company

British Gas Services (BGS) is the largest domestic central heating and gas appliance installation company in the UK, directly employing more than 8,000 engineers to carry out servicing and breakdown services. The BGS contact centre operation comprises five Area Service Centres (handling inbound and outbound service contacts) and a National Centre (handling new business, membership and retention calls). BGS’ 1,690 full-time contact centre personnel deal with more than 3.4 million British Gas customers.

The Business Challenge

Eighteen months ago, resource planners were bogged down in processing exceptions and managing holidays rather than in forward planning and there were attrition and performance issues in BGS’ contact centre operations.

Clearly, this was not a recipe for success. A root and branch investigation of operations identified several areas that needed attention - from the way employee schedules were created and implemented, to the manner in which candidates were identified and recruited.

The Solution

In the resource scheduling area, BGS introduced new training to upskill its resource planners and invested in new workforce optimisation tools.

Already a heavy user of Aspect technology, BGS decided to upgrade to the latest version of the workforce management tool, Aspect® Workforce Management. As well as gaining a new user interface, BGS also invested in two enhancement modules for Aspect Workforce Management:

- Perform: provides management with an at-a-glance view of agent activity in real time and compares that to scheduled activities.

- Empower: gives BGS agents the ability to make holiday and some in-day exception requests on a self-serve basis; plus enables BGS Team Managers (TMs) to schedule one-on-ones and team time. The Notification Server part of Empower lets TMs and agents know about changes when requests have been approved.

Aspect Software

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