UK’s Largest Department Store Retailer John Lewis Selects InVision Software for Optimised WFM
InVision Software, one of the leading international providers of cloud-based workforce management solutions, was selected by John Lewis, the UK´s largest department store retailer, to implement a demand-oriented workforce management (WFM) software for scheduling the 800 agents at its newly established two main contact centres.
John Lewis, part of John Lewis Partnership, is the UK’s largest department store retailer with 32 shops across the UK (28 department stores and four John Lewis at home) and its online business johnlewis.com. The responsibility for handling incoming customer calls was moved from the John Lewis stores to two new contact centres in Scotland (Hamilton) and Didsbury near Manchester in June 2010.
One of the key features that supported John Lewis’ decision for InVision was the integrated BackOffice Planning enabling at the same time an optimised staff scheduling for telephony and for back-office activities. Besides demand-oriented scheduling of its agents, the company requested a controlling tool enabling the planner to perform a target-versus-actual analysis and assessments in real time. At the same time, the employees’ motivation and acceptance of flexible shifts is boosted by the module Infothek Interactive Schedule which enables agents to swap shifts, alerts them to scheduled changes in activities as well as to changes made to an existing schedule and also allows automatic holiday approval against agreed thresholds.
“An excellent service as well as high customer satisfaction is essential for our day-to-day-business. Therefore, the satisfaction and motivation of our employees is very important to us as well”, explains Michael Bullard, Resource Planning Manager at John Lewis. “With the help of the workforce management system InVision Enterprise WFM, we are able to provide the required service quality by optimising the scheduling of our agents, considering their working time and holiday requests at the same time.”