Top 6 Opportunities to Increase Capacity and Productivity

By understanding and having actionable intelligence on work, people and processes, companies can make smarter decisions on how to optimize their resources and workloads to meet customer service goals. Following are six commonly overlooked opportunities to increase capacity and productivity.

1. Idle time and non-production time. Capturing data directly from the employee desktop can help you:

• Track application usage and understand how time is being spent
• Compare this data with the work that was scheduled
• Distinguish between time spent in production-related applications vs. non-work related applications
• Identify idle time.At Verint, we typically see a 10 – 25 percent productivity lift from rationalizing production vs. non-production activities.

2. Data-Driven Staffing Models.  Most organizations operate in silos and staff to the peak volumes for each group, creating downtime that could be used elsewhere in the organization. A holistic, enterprise capacity model can help companies optimize underutilized staff, saving 10 – 15 percent in resource costs.
3. Overtime:  Many organizations are unable to justify and understand when overtime is appropriate, using it to meet service goals and causing unnecessary or excessive overtime. Optimizing the use and deployment of resources often reduces overtime by 5 to 15 percent.
4. Schedule Optimization:  Optimized schedules are ideally activity-based. So, not only should they indicate shift start/end, breaks and scheduled meetings/training, etc., but also what type of work the employee should be executing when. Thus, time spent in production is focused on the right activities. Optimized schedules have helped organizations improve productivity and capacity by 10 to 15 percent.
5. Faster Turnaround Time:  Less idle time and downtime—and  the ability to focus resources on the priority work items—helps  ensure companies meet their service goals. We’ve seen customers improve their turnaround times by as much as 60 percent.
6. Manager Time:  New tools enable the integration of data from legacy systems, workflow solutions and desktop analytics tools to automate the time-consuming processes of workload scheduling, time off requests, and report generation.  The automation of all these administrative tasks frees managers to spend more time coaching employees and handling customer escalations or exceptions, improving their productivity by 25 to 30 percent.

Not all operations capture all of these opportunities. In fact, most organizations we work with will focus on one or two based on their specific business goals, such as:

• Improving operational efficiency through optimizing resource planning and scheduling, and decreasing overtime.
• Enhancing customer satisfaction through faster turnaround times and lower cost to serve.
• Increasing employee engagement through cross training/skill development and less downtime.