BofA Installs Productivity System

With a view toward raising call center productivity, Bank of America has tapped the TotalView workforce management system from IEX, a Dallas-based contact center technology company.

Demonstrated support for multi-site contact center operations and the ability to monitor agent schedule adherence in real-time were deciding factors, according to Paul Speights, vice president of planning and operations at Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America.

TotalView automates the scheduling of agents by matching available resources to forecasted contact center workloads. Additional features include skills-based and multimedia scheduling, real-time and historical adherence, short- and long-term resource planning, intraday management, vacation and holiday planning, enterprise reporting and Web-based delivery of agent schedules and statistics.

Bank of America decided to replace its previous workforce management system with TotalView after evaluating other systems on the market. TotalView met many of the bank's key evaluation criteria, Speights said. "With the TotalView solution Bank of America contact centers are also positioned to consistently meet service level goals and maximize operational efficiency."

TotalView will be phased in over a three-year period at Bank of America's network of 30 call center sites and 11,000 contact agents nationwide, according to IEX officials.

"The timetable has more to do with logistics than anything else," said Brian Spraetz, director of marketing at IEX. "We are planning to have a week of training at each facility, each of which is different, and we need to account for those differences."

Introduced in 1995, TotalView has been fine-tuned to meet the demands of high-volume customer service departments.

"Institutions like Bank of America understand that improving productivity in call centers can have a tremendous effect on the bottom line," Spraetz said. "That's exactly what TotalView is designed for."

For example, an intraday management feature, which provides real-time updates every 15 minutes, ensures that the right number of agents are available to meet varying levels of demand. "If the call volume is high on a particular day, they can make the necessary adjustments," said Spraetz. "By the same token, if the volume is low, managers can find other activities for agents such as filing or training, or even send a certain portion home."

Bank of America officials were particularly impressed with TotalView's single server architecture, Spraetz said, adding that the bank's previous workforce management system ran on more than 10 servers.