[Telus has about 30,000 employees, 9,000 of whom work in the field. The company was mandated to reduce 25 percent of employees in that area, while continuing to meet service level targets.] Management wasn't going to give us back those people, so we needed to work smarter. We were scrambling to figure out how we could make it up and do this, ... We knew the potential for gain was there. If we could move ourselves from five to six service calls a day, that would be a huge gain in productivity. |
[The company now measures service levels two to three times a day, and the firm's stock is at its highest in four or five years.] There was a time of pain, ... Now we're back to normal service levels. So to the shareholders, we've been able to recover from the downturn. We haven't brought in more people or reduced the amount of work yet we're meeting our targets again. |
[Using WebFOCUS allowed the company to take other things into consideration, such as how difficult the project was, whether a user experienced any technical difficulty, and if she had to wait for a customer.] IB used a scorecard that looks at a more holistic view of the days of your life. Employees are starting to see it's a more reflective interpretation, ... You can manage them to death to get productivity numbers up for one quarter, [but] there's a shift in the cultural norm for this to be sustainable. |
It was all over the papers. We had minimal service-level commitments. Customers were waiting days just to get their phones fixed. [They] were sending letters to regulatory agencies. |
Management wasn't going to give us back those people, so we needed to work smarter. We were scrambling to figure out how we could make it up and do this. We knew the potential for gain was there. If we could move ourselves from five to six service calls a day, that would be a huge gain in productivity. |
The project paid for itself in a single month. Every 30 minutes your gain is millions of dollars. It's effective when you work with a large workforce. |
There was a time of pain. Now we're back to normal service levels. So to the shareholders, we've been able to recover from the downturn. We haven't brought in more people or reduced the amount of work yet we're meeting our targets again. |
We had no idea where we were starting and where we needed to go, so we started a field force approach to workforce optimization. |