InVision Tackles FSA Regulation in Contact Centres
New FSA regulation across a range of services in the financial sector comes into force in October this year and in January 2005. These rules will affect the whole process of mortgage and insurance sales and administration, from the publication of advertisements through to the termination of agreements with customers. Thus, insurance and mortgage vendors and intermediaries must comply if they provide products affected by this new level of regulation. Financial services providers must ensure their staff are appropriately skilled and qualified, particularly if their duties bring them into contact with customers. The introduction of legislation in the financial services sector means that large financial penalties can levied, or operating licenses removed if customers are sold financial products by agents not qualified to do so.
Scheduling appropriately qualified staff is one of the greatest challenges management has to face in the financial services sector if they are to comply with FSA regulation. An appropriate solution, such as InVision’s Staff Planning System (SPS), supports both service centres and agencies in optimising their call centre workforce. It takes into account employees’ skills to ensure that only qualified agents advise on regulated financial products.
Workforce management solutions automate and optimise the whole staff scheduling process according to business needs. The control and management of scheduling is a complex task, particularly in organisations with a large number of employees working flexible hours with diverse competency profiles. When scheduling personnel, software solutions from InVision lead to dramatic increases in efficiency and reduction in costs.
InVision SPS analyses historical data to accurately forecast future staffing requirements, thus meeting customer demand. This enables companies, such as insurance or mortgage intermediaries, to respond proactively and to plan accordingly. Additionally, SPS allows companies to accurately manage employee schedules based on the skills required for different activities in different time periods. One can associate as many skills as considered necessary to each activity. So for example, only one skill may be necessary for a given activity, but more than one skill for another, in which case the employee would have to possess all skills to be considered qualified for the task. InVision SPS features a special function called Job Optimisation, which is run after having allocated shifts. It places presences on replaceable activities where the staff requirement has not yet been met. Then it re-schedules activities which have the highest priority, which have not yet been fully covered. The exchange is successful if the coverage of the requirement has been approved and the employee has the necessary skills. Those employees with the highest skill rating for each activity are scheduled against the respective activity as a priority. Moreover, SPS enables supervisors to ensure coverage and service levels are met by having the right agents available at the right times, whilst integrating staff requests for particular working hours in the planning process. InVision helps companies to control the deployment of employees to activities based on their skills and experience profile, providing accurate reports on each employee’s performance and adherence to work schedules.
InVision’s Staff Planning System is a modular solution, supporting all the facets of needs-oriented workforce management, from requirement and capacity planning, shift and operation planning, to a broad range of options for integrating staff into the planning process. “Every step in our workforce management solution is supported by fully integrated workflow which enables companies to schedule staff based on business needs and the availability of skills,” - John Cann, Country Manager UK and Ireland.