Barclaycard Contact Centers - Optimizing Resource Requirements by Improving Shift Patterns

Barclaycard selected SIMUL8 to support operational decision-making within their Customer Contact Centers.

Operating in over 60 countries worldwide , Barclaycard is the leading credit card business in Europe, and has made continued strategic investment to enhance customer data management techniques to help develop and tailor more sophisticated customer products and services.

The SIMUL8 Solution
Barclaycard required a simulation solution to support them in quantifying the most appropriate resource and skills mix in order to deliver a consistently high standard of customer service within their Contact Centers.

Barclaycard had been using an alternative simulation package to SIMUL8 but found this did not provide the necessary cost-benefit analysis for the use of simulation in the organization and was also more expensive than SIMUL8.

After careful consideration of the market, Barclaycard chose SIMUL8. SIMUL8 was able to clearly demonstrate the required cost-benefit analysis and enabled users to identify and test the benefit of potential improvement proposals, prior to their implementation in practice.

SIMUL8 was used to build a model of Barclaycard’s existing Contact Center processes, where calls to the switchboard are routed to either Sales or Support Agents. It was recognized that vast improvements in the day to day running of Barclaycard’s Contact Centers could be made if a simulation tool was available at a lower management level.

As such, SIMUL8 Corporation developed a user-friendly front end application that allowed novice simulation users to easily experiment with detailed aspects of the agent shift patterns and test the impact of changes to these shift patterns.

The Result
SIMUL8 is successfully used within Barclaycard’s Regional Contact Centers to optimize staff utilization and customer service levels, while minimizing cost.

The SIMUL8 model allows Barclaycard’s contact center operational planning teams to test “what-if” scenarios for shift patterns and monitor metrics including calls answered, calls abandoned, calls lost and agent utilization.

SIMUL8’s powerful reporting features support the teams to determine the optimum mix of resources to meet their KPI goals.