Case Study: NLB Contact Center

NLB Group is the leading banking and financial group in the region of Southeast Europe. Its Contact Center is available to customers 24 hours a day, every day of the year. At the contact center, a dedicated team of over 100 employees with specialized knowledge is always ready to assist clients with all their banking needs. To ensure seamless delivery of the diverse range of services provided by the contact center, they always strive to maintain an adequate number of employees with the right competencies and skills at their workplace.

Challenge: Creating Work Schedules and Shift Swaps

Creating work schedules for a considerable workforce is an arduous task that involves balancing the operational requirements of the business, regulatory limitations, and the employees' preferences. The entire process is akin to building a house of cards, where a minor change can topple the entire schedule, necessitating a time-consuming rebuilding process from scratch.

Moreover, making changes to the existing shift schedule poses a logistical hurdle. This involves soliciting proposals and requests for adjustments, searching for suitable replacements, and updating the current schedule with executed swaps. A simple misunderstanding can lead to an incomplete work position, which can disrupt the entire work schedule.

Manually creating and coordinating work schedules for a large number of employees is an extremely difficult and stressful task.

Shiftplan: Automatic Scheduling and Coordination of Shift Swaps

The ShiftPlan solution is an ideal fit for the aforementioned challenges. Its implementation at NLB Contact Center has streamlined and automated the process of work time planning. Consequently, managers' workload has been significantly reduced while enabling more personalized attention to employees' wishes and needs.

Employees can submit their requests and preferences for upcoming periods through their personal portal. The Automatic Scheduling Module considers these, along with legislative constraints, work process requirements, and other rules, to create the work schedule. Thanks to the use of advanced artificial intelligence methods, a vast number of interlocking requirements can be easily handled, leading to a more balanced schedule that can simultaneously accommodate a large number of constraints and desires! Additionally, all rules are well-defined and digitized, rendering them independent of the individual responsible for creating the schedule.

The published schedule is available on employees' personal portals, where they also receive notifications of any changes. With the Shift Swap Module, employees can independently arrange for shift swaps. The application suggests and verifies the suitability of the proposed swaps.

By implementing the ShiftPlan solution, NLB Contact Center has completely automated the process of creating the work schedule, as well as subsequent shift swaps among employees.

The ShiftPlan solution has significantly streamlined the Contact Center's scheduling process, which can be a daunting task for a large team that operates around the clock. Since we adopted the solution for schedule creation, we have noticed a significant reduction in the time and effort needed to create schedules, thanks to the automated scheduling feature. Additionally, it is extremely helpful for all colleagues to access their schedules on their mobile devices, in addition to their computers. The application is user-friendly, and the implementation was speedy. The ShiftPlan team is very responsive and always ready to find new solutions to meet our specific needs.

Klemen Kalin, group lead, NLB Contact Center