City of Fort Worth
Fort Worth’s Customer Care Division, with 16 front-line customer service representatives (CSR), streamlined time management in spring of 2022.
The scheduling and timekeeping processes touch 20 people in the Customer Care Division who answer calls for 11 nonemergency departments and the mayor’s office. The division has about 300,000 public-facing interactions per year and reports to the Communications and Public Engagement Department.
The city has contracted with NICE for about five years and added NICE SmartSync in 2022 to establish a connection between NICE Workforce Management and PeopleSoft ERP, according to a case study.
The rollout created greater transparency, eliminated separate time clock interfaces and simplified the leave and time off process. The configuration was a collaborative effort including the vendor, division leaders and various city IT staff.
For Sharon Gamble, Customer Care Division administrator, the automation of clocking in and out is a huge win for the virtual team.
“Now when they log in [to their work computers], that's their time in, so there's no time wasted anymore,” Gamble told Industry Insider — Texas. “When [CSRs] log in to their computers, they're logging into their timesheet. And when they log out for lunch, they're logging out of their timesheet ... so there is absolutely no time wasted now. They’re not going anywhere to enter data that they couldn't do right to begin with.”
By the numbers, according to the case study, the Fort Worth division is saving about one hour per day per agent, translating to about 416 hours a year, and 67 percent time saved for supervisors working on schedules. The team also has 97 percent “schedule adherence” and improved customer satisfaction surveys.
Gamble said time saved is actually greater than reported, as she believes they were conservative when making time-on-task estimates. Regardless, she said it has been a successful undertaking, and the vendor recognized the effort with a Trailblazer of the Year Award.
"The beauty of it is that we had NICE, so when you have a contract, it's just a service that you're contracting for,” Gamble said. “We put in for capital … I proved out that it would save us all this time, and it's doubled what I had expected."
According to Customer Care Division manager Emily Burns and supervisors Markal Augustus and Katherine Cabello, there are multiple components to keeping up with the CSRs and daily scheduling such as shift bids, time-off requests, lunch time and break times.
Shift bids are based on performance and season, and a third shift is needed in March through summer due to higher call volume.
Bilingual representatives need to be available without a gap in service, too, so those schedules are easier to maintain with transparency that manual processes such as email or shared calendars can’t offer.
The CSRs can now see the open schedule slots and available time off in one place.
“We're no longer having to go in to find out who requested what off … we can go ahead and approve the next person off because it already blocks off,” Burns said. “If the day is available, they know they can go in and select that day versus emailing the supervisors, trying to figure out who already requested the time off,” said Burns.
The system sends automatic alerts, syncs to the PeopleSoft ERP and was already available via the city contract, so once the city was ready to implement, it didn’t take a full procurement process to get started.
“There’s always a person on the line,” Burns said.
